Why I Had A Goat In My Bed

A couple days ago we worked out in the pasture all day, burning our yearly burn pile. When we were getting ready to head up to the house, Joy walked off towards the shed, and we knew she was getting ready to have her babies.

Her udder looked like it was ready to pop. Poor girl. If your offended by the back end of a goat. Sorry. It's a pretty normal normal thing around here right now.

We checked on her later that evening and still no babies. So that night I headed out before bed to check on her. I carried the big spotlight, so I could shine it around the pasture. When I took a look around I could see she was licking a baby on the ground, and I saw a back leg kick. So I thought things were OK. I tried to walk out to where she was but the whole herd wanted to follow. So I threw out some hay, and then grabbed a couple paper towels out of the shed, before trying to head back over to her. When I looked at the baby it wasn't moving. I put my hand under its head to lift it up expecting a reaction, and there was none! It wasn't moving, breathing, NOTHING! It was limp, and it's abdomen was sloshing with fluid. I felt terrible. If only I had headed out immediately. I decided that I should at least try to revive it, but didn't really think it had a chance. I picked the baby up by its back legs and swung it around, to drain the fluid out. I set it down, and started pressing on its ribs. I didn't have a clue what I was doing. I just pressed a bunch, and pretty fast. Then took a break to take a look at Joy who was on my other side. Then do it again. Joy started delivering her second baby, and it was in the sack. I had to stop to ripe the sack open and off its face, and wipe its nose. Then left it to Joy to continue cleaning, while I pressed some more. I stopped and the second baby started crying to Momma, then I heard a light noise come from the first baby. I put my hand back on it, and could feel its heart beating! Thank you Lord! I began rubbing it vigorously to stimulate it, and help get the fluid out. I picked it up, and swung it around again. That got the majority of the rest of the fluid out. I set it down and rubbed it more with the couple paper towels I had. Once it seemed to be doing OK, I checked to see what it was. A girl! A pretty pure white girl. Then I checked the second baby, a GIRL. Yay! She is white with black markings. 

I ran to the house, grabbed animal towels (We keep a stash of old bath towels designated for animal use), and got my Mom who carried out a baby bottle. We headed back out. My Dad followed all the commotion.  The little girl #1 was freezing cold, and was to weak to nurse. Joys milk was flowing heavily, so it only took me a minute to fill the 8 oz. bottle. We dried her off the best we could, but she couldn't get warmed up. I have had to bring in babies and warm them up before, and give them a bottle, but I was tired and sore. I carried her up to the house (leaving my Parents to situate Joy and her second baby in a pen for the night), grabbed my heating pad, set it on high, and placed it on my bed. Set her on top wrapped in her towel, and curled up next to her. As soon as she got warmed up, she guzzled down the whole bottle. As much as she tried she couldn't stand up. My Mom gave her a Bo-Se injection. About 30 minutes later she was walking around. I took her back out to Joy, who was very happy to have her back. I made sure she nursed, so she would know were things were, and not think all her meals were coming from a bottle. When I headed back up to the house after FINALLY getting her to nurse, my Mom was coming back out to find out what happened to me : ) I got to crawl into bed somewhere between 1-2 AM. But was it worth it. Totally. I love raising goats.

 Girl #1 I wanted to name her Miracle, but some people around here (I'm not naming names) don't like it.

Girl # 2

The next morning I got up, headed out to check on everybody and Daisy was standing in the front of the pasture with this little pure white girl!

She looked at me with a look that said "Isn't she beautiful!"

In the late morning today, when I took my second walk out to check on Hyacinth, she was cleaning off this pretty little girl!

She is banded light tan and white.

And here is Onslow. The proud Father of all these beautiful little girls. He's half LaMancha, and half Saanen. He is still in the process of shedding his winter coat. Please forgive him of his ugly horns. He had been given a horrid dehorning job. I was never able to get a baby picture of him, because his poor head was so messed up.

He is such a sweet boy. We love him so much.

Kimberly

Murphy's Law + Snooki

I had it planned out to do a post including seed starting. I took the pictures of some of the seed packets when I got started.

 My friend Tina gave me a whole bag full of these plant tags she made out of old window blinds. They are so much nicer than the ones you buy at the store.

The seeds I got free from WinterSown . I planned to try one of each, and then decide which ones I like the best, and next year separate them for seed.

I got them all planted and marked. I filled three flats with there 4" pots.

Set up my mini greenhouse, and set it in the only place that I thought was safe. "Thought" that's the key word. Last year I was able to set it on the edge of the back porch up, against a shelf, and tie it to the shelf so the wind wouldn't knock it over. But when my Dad fixed the back porch, we moved the shelf. Leaving me with nothing to strap it to. So this time around I set it on the edge of the porch up against the freezer. I thought that the freezer would block the wind from blowing it over. I was wrong! The north wind came up a few days back during the night. When I woke up, I could hear it crashing into the house. I dreaded getting out of bed knowing it could not have withstood these strong gusts, causing the house to creak and pop. 

It knocked it over spilling the tiny newly emerged seedlings out onto the ground. As a began picking plants up and putting them back in there pots, I realized it wasn't as terrible as it could have been. I managed to save about 90 %. Some got spilled together preventing me from being able to identify what tomato plants they are, but at least they survived. My main loss was the herbs I had just planted a couple days before. They will all need to be reseeded, along with all the tomatoes that lost there tags, so I know what I am testing out.

They are all back in the greenhouse, but this time I Gorilla taped it to the freezer. I have learned my lesson.

I'm starting to think this place should be called Murphy's Law Farm.

My parents took a little day trip and picked up her new cow on Sunday.

Before they picked up the cow she said the seller named the cow Snooki!  And I asked if she was going to rename her, since we are not fans of that show. She said "We will wait and see. If the cow knows its name, it will stay." When they backed the trailer in the driveway, I climbed up on the side of the trailer to take a look. I was shocked! She is soooo tiny! And she was Snooki! It is so funny how fitting her name is, and she does know her name.

I think she's as close as we will get to watching Jersey Shore. 

She needs a bit of a fattening. Obviously we know how to do that ; ) But she is supposed to be 16 months old and already bred. My Mom asked if she is a miniature, since she is so tiny, but the guy didn't know. My parents said all his Jerseys were really tiny including the bull she was bred to, so I looked Miniature Jerseys up, and that is what she looks like. I'm glad. I don't want to handle any great big cows anymore, and my Parents aren't getting any younger. Not that any of us are. So she looks like the perfect cow for our family. She isn't used to being handled much, but we aren't having any trouble winning her over with grain, apples, and yesterday she discovered how wonderful it is to have a human brush her.

So that's Snooki.

Kimberly

Rainy Days *Warning Contains Graphic Image*

We finally got some much needed rain. 

This was only the beginning.

I had to break out my Muck Boots. It was the only way I could walk down the pathway to the pasture, without slipping and sliding all over on the clay.

The lambs stayed snug and dry in their pen.

The cats found a nice dry place to cuddle up outside the kitchen door.

My Dad recently brought this chipper home from his parents house. Now we can put it to work making lots of wood chips for the garden. Yay! Bye bye pesky weeds.

One of my Peruvian guinea pigs, Lottie, had her babies. She had two but only one survived birth. A little female. Here she is at a few days old.

*Now we get to the graphic stuff.*

I know everyone wanted a update on my Moms cow Sweet Pea. 

Well, she continued to gain weight even though we tried to keep her on a sparse diet of rye hay. Any little change in diet would cause her to bloat, and always laying on her right side with her rumen sticking up (their rumen is on the left side). Cows or any ruminant animal, cannot burp when they are laying on there side. 

Finding your sweet pet cow laid out with her legs sticking in the air, and her abdomen swollen to twice its normal size is quite a horrible site.  She would gasp for air, with all the gas in her crushing her lungs. My Mom was very careful about feeding her, but she just kept gaining weight causing her belly to hang down lower and lower. 

So it was very sad for my Mom to have to make the decision to have her butchered. But it was either that or she was just going to end up dying one day when we didn't catch her in a fit. I think she has bloated a total of five times, and that's five times to many. It's not easy getting a cow rolled back over onto its feet! At least if it was a goat a single person could pick it up. This last time we (my Mom and I) tried and tried, and just could not get her up ourselves. So my Mom got the tractor, and I tied her lead rope to the back of it. she pulled, while I pushed, and it pulled her right up. Then I thought "Why didn't we do that before!" 

So the next day was the appointment for her to get butchered and when the guy that does the slaughter showed up, he said that he had never seen a cow like her in all the years he has been butchering. We were a little nervous that there was going to be something like a tumor inside of her, and the butcher was quite sure that there was something bad in there. But to everyone's surprise IT WAS JUST FAT. Tons of fat. Bright yellow, so yellow it was almost orange.

This is just the fat that was on the intestines and rumen. There was lots of chunks of fat that was thrown into another container, but I thought I would spare you the image.

He showed us her reproductive organs and they were completely normal with no problems. Still no explanation as to why she had milk without a calf. And the milk never did dry up. 

It was a sad day, but it ended with quite a surprise. After a tiring day of getting everything cleaned up after the cow was done. I went out that evening to feed the goats, and one of our newer goats (Henna) was out in the shed with a baby toddling around her looking for milk. We were not expecting her to have her baby for about a month! I hurried to feed the goats, so they wouldn't follow us out there. And we rushed out to check the new baby.

Where did those ears come from?! Her Mom is LaMancha. It turns out the previous owners Nubian got her, before she put her in with the LaMancha buck. Surprise, Surprise. She is so tiny, and I mean tiny. 

So we had to play musical animals to get her situated in a nice warm, dry pen. That meant moving the lambs here, so we can move that goat and baby over there, Oh well...... Let me just say we went to bed very tired that night.

Kimberly

Pasture Happenings

The lambs are growing like weeds. It is amazing how fast sheep grow!

 Myrtle

 Maggie

 Myrtle again

 We settled on the name Maestro for the little ram lamb. He's the tiny guy closest to the camera.

I can't help taking so many pictures of her. She's always at my side.

I figured out why Violet is such a slow poke. She was pregnant. Poor little girl. She had her first baby around the time she should have been getting bred. I guess she had her own plans. Surprisingly she's a good little Mama.

Pepe Le Pew

I love his white waddles. I love waddles!

Apparently he was sired by one of the angora or angora cross bucks.

Now Jubilee was the cause of me penning all the bucks up early. (The weird weather threw all the animals in season early.) So I knew she had gotten herself bred, I just didn't know who the Daddy was. Mystery solved yesterday.

Kanga is definitely her Daddy.

What makes it even stranger is she was a single. I thought for sure there was going to be another. Jubilee alway has twins. Oh well. She's cute.

Going for a walk with the goats.

 Morning Glory, sporting her sleek white PVC pipe accessorized with black Gorilla Tape. 

 They practically disappear in all the wispy stems from the grass seed.

Out to the Eucalyptus trees

Yum yum. I keep the fence closed in the Winter for this very reason. Goats only girdle trees during the winter. Or at least ours do.

Kimberly

Surprise, Surprise. Baaaaa! Continues

Well I came across an ad on Craigslist for a 1 week old female lamb for $25, and couldn't resist. I ran it by my parents, and they gave me the OK to contact the seller, to find out what breed she was. Within minutes we got a phone call from the seller to let us know she was still available, and that yes she is a woolie (I don't want hair sheep). I asked what breed? "Oh, her father is a Suffolk, her mother is a white face." There are a lot of white face breeds.... I told her we are already feeding a couple of lambs, and I handed the phone over to my Mom to arrange pick up. It turned out that she had several other people contact her, but didn't know anything about bottle feeding lambs, so she turned them down. But when I told her we were bottle feeding before I handed the phone over, she then told my Mom she had another one we could have free! It was born that morning, was a twin, and got separated from its Mother. She tried to give it back to its Mom, but she didn't want it anymore. AND SHE DOESN'T LIKE BOTTLE FEEDING. 

So we zipped on over and picked them up. She was very nice, and showed us their Mothers. I asked her what breed are her white face sheep (Hey it was worth a try.), but she didn't know. She said they are crosses of some sort. She handed me the tiny little newborn lamb. I checked the sex. Boy. I was surprised he had dents in his head like the girls. I asked if he would get horns, just to make sure, she said "No, oh its a boy. I didn't even check." I think its so funny, because every time one of our animals delivers a baby, that's the first thing we check. She did make sure that they got colostrum, so that's good, and said she would keep our phone number in case she ends up with anymore.

So here are the little darlings.

 Marigold

We haven't settled on a name for him yet.

I had a real hard time trying to get pictures, because they want to look right at the lens, and then the camera's battery died.

"Does that thing have any milk?"

Kimberly

Entropion/turn-in eyelid in lambs

When I was reading in Raising Sheep The Modern Way last night I came across the problem with the lambs eyes. It's caused by their eyelids being curled inwards causing their lashes and hair to rub the eyeball. In her   case its her bottom lids. Natasha Marie recognized this just from the picture I posted.

I have to say the forms of treatment did not sound very good. Stitching the eyelid to the cheek to hold it down, cutting the eyelid to make it open properly, holding the lids open with tape (I don't know how that works) and there was something in the book about injecting medication under the lid to form a bubble to hold it open till it heals. But I didn't quite understand it. I was tired, and it was late. So I put the book down. So this morning I did a google search, and this video is the first thing to pop up.

                        

After my Mom and I watched it a couple of times, we decided to give it a try. I held, while my Mom injected. We already had the necessities. The first eye went pretty smoothly except for having to make a needle change after the first one clogged, and then blew off spraying penicillin everywhere. So we got it full of 1 ml. and it looked great. Then for the second eye. For some reason she could only get a tiny bit of penicillin in it. At first she thought the needle was clogged, but it wasn't. She eventually tried a larger needle, and it still wouldn't fill the lid. For some reason she just flat out could not get it to fill the lid, like there was no where for it to go. But she got a little in it, and it was staying open properly. So we decided that between the little bit we got in her and the number of times she got jabbed would hopefully keep it swollen long enough for the eye to heal, and she got penicillin in all those jabs. Hopefully all will be well, and she took it like a champ. Oh ya, we also put more mastitis medication in her eyes. This stuff comes sterilized in a syringe , and is the same ointment they sell for eye infections, but much cheaper.

Then it was time to dock both girls tails. We already knew to band them with the elastrator, we just didn't know exactly the right spot. When the video for the eye problem finished it popped up with their other video for tail docking. I love the internet! I can't get it to embed the docking video, but here is the link http://youtu.be/ny06ppuH3Oo

And we finally settled on names. Myrtle, and Magnolia (Maggie for short).

Kimberly

Surprise, Surprise. Baaaaa!

I was out back with the goats, when my Mom came home from the feed store. When I walked up to the house, she had been unloading hay out of the back of her SUV, and she was talking to an older gentleman that was parked behind her. I was rather confused. I didn't know who he was. I assumed a neighbor from down the road. They were talking about measurements. Then he said "Well here you go." and opened up a cage he had covered in the back of his truck, and takes out two lambs and hands one to each of us. Then he gave my Mom a container of lamb milk replacer. That explained the measurements.

So as it turns out when my Mom went to the feed store, and this man came in looking to find a home for these lambs that his sheep rejected. He normally takes care of them, but he is going away for the holidays with his wife, and they don't have anyone to take on the responsibility of bottle feeding. I guess he has given lambs to one of the women at the feed store before, but today she wasn't interested. When my Mom saw them she couldn't resist. He told her he had a bag of milk replacer at his house, and he would pick it up, and then drop them off. No sooner did my Mom get home, and begin unloading the hay when he drove up. Turns out he went back into the feed store, and bought a container of the milk replacer instead of driving back to his house. So not only did he give her two free lambs, but he bought her a container of milk replacer too!

So I dug out the book Raising Sheep the Modern Way. I guess that will be my reading material for a while. And get this. The reason we had a sheep book before sheep. My Mom found it free at our local thrift store along with a llama book. Hmmmmm whats next, hehe.

I asked the guy what breed they are. He said there mixed. But I still wonder what they are mixes of. All I know is that they are wool sheep, not hair sheep, and they are three days old. My Mom said he told her there a male and female. I guess he didn't take a very good gander, they are both girls!

So here are the little darlings who don't have names yet.

The blackfaced one has yucky eyes. I put some medicine in them. Hopefully they will clear up fast.

Kimberly