Four new arrivals and a wedding anniversary

Date Published: 16-Oct-2008

IT should have been a wedding anniversary celebration night out with fancy food and wine . . . instead it was an evening in the maternity ward with four new arrivals and little sleep.

Sean and Antoinette Larkin from Abbey, Loughrea, had the night of Sunday, October 12, pencilled in for dinner to celebrate their 12th wedding anniversary – but nature intervened in the shape of one of their pedigree Simmental cows.

Glockerl, which translates into bell, is of Austrian/German origin but back in 2003, she was one of a batch of 40 pedigree Simmental cows that Sean Larkin brought to his farm at Tomany, Kylebrack, from Alpine country.

She hasn’t been idle since either, delivering single calves in 2004, ’05 and ’07 while in 2006, Glockerl had her first set of twins. What happened though on the Sunday evening of October 12 was entirely unexpected.

The calving was pretty much on schedule as Sean Larkin had his dates spot on – no surprise in that as he performed the artificial insemination process himself from the ‘straw’ of a pedigree Simmental bull.

While he didn’t have the cow scanned, Sean suspected that Glockerl was carrying twins – she was a bit more bulky than normal and she did have a CV with twins on the paperwork. Sean noticed…