I would've posted before now. In fact, I'd intended to, but then it started raining and the temp dropped into the thirties for several days (while we had 44 of our family members here for Thanksgiving) and you know what that means if you've ever even heard of ranching.
All hell broke loose.
I will say that it started off in a Pollyanna kind of way when this little guy was born on Wednesday morning. It was all rainbows and butterflies...
...for five minutes until the next one hit the ground just after the rain and thirty degree temp rolled in.
"Brownie," as L named him, is super cute but his momma had no interest in him. I'll condense all of the boring details into one long run on sentence to give you an idea of the past week with him.
Every few hours for days we had to catch and hold his mom since that's the only way she would let him eat, but she didn't have enough milk so we robbed some from another nanny (who had great milk production, a huge healthy kid and also an infection which warranted a trip to the vet-sigh) and then had to give him several bottle feedings of formula all while we watched him get weaker until he finally turned the corner-for now-yesterday, getting regular unprompted feedings from his momma and even being turned out with the goat herd today.
He and we just might survive this craziness!
On Sunday morning (still 34 degrees and raining) another baby was born to the aforementioned heavy milk producing nanny, followed by a surprise baby that afternoon and her super surprise twin we found three hours later.
Here are those three all tucked in for the night.
It was a crazy night making sure Brownie was getting fed every three hours and keeping the babies out of the rain.
Somehow we underestimated the weakness of the super surprise twin and found her near death the next morning (though she had nursed the night before). It was very sad and we don't know what did her in, but have decided to be more aggressive in how we handle newborns of first time moms from now on.
Hindsight's twenty-twenty.
That loss and Brownie's turn for the worse on the same day after all that intensive care we'd been giving him throughout the weekend made for a rough Monday.
Kaydie, SK, and I spent hours out at the barn that day, desperately trying to get a hold on things; to stop the bleeding.
At one point we broke away to check the rest of the herd and heard a chicken making a HUGE ruckus which is not at all the norm; they're very quiet.
Kaydie: Maybe she's laying an egg. I've heard they can be noisy.
Me: You know, Leslie's friend I met this summer said when her chicken first laid an egg it was super loud as if announcing what she'd done. I thought it sounded a little iffy, but maybe it's true.
So we headed over to check and sure enough, there was a nice brown egg!
I'm not even making this up. After our little photo opp Mirabelle never made another sound.
Thanks, Mirabelle, we needed that bright spot on a tough day. Chickens for the win yet again! :)
Back at the barn we loaded up the momma goat and took her to the vet, then picked up the boys who were repulsed by the smell of an infected goat confined in my Tahoe, and headed home to burn the hay we'd raked out of the barn.
Another bright spot was Chick fil a Premier Night. I cannot tell you how excited we are to have a brand new Chick fil a in town!
Now, here are some non doom and gloom pics from the past week. :)
Heading out to fill the deer feeder with Daddy
As I got my phone out to show Grandmama that we now have three-THREE!-eggs it dawned on me I'd put all of my eggs in one basket.
Today I was counting goats and came up short only to turn around and see this.
And suddenly this made perfect sense.
By my calculation we're all of 16.7% through our first kidding season with just 83.3% to go!
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