Leftover Night

Well, it's been a while since I've posted and all these interesting photos are just piling up on me so I'm going to blog the equivalent of a "leftover's night" when you go through your fridge and everybody has to eat leftovers for dinner. ;)

First. I noticed Sahara was shedding cashmere (yes, the oober expensive stuff sweaters are made out of) like mad so I went and bought her a brush and commenced to brush her to try to salvage some of it. At first when she saw me coming with the brush she looked at me in horror and ran away. I kept telling her this is going to rock her world but she refused to even entertain the notion. So I ended up locking her in one of the stalls and physically cornering her while holding her collar and commenced brushing. After about 30 seconds she settled down and you could see her little brain working (in the voice of the shark from Finding Nemo) "Ooooooooh.... thats gooooooooooood." Pretty soon I saw her eyes closing and she looked quite dazed by the good feelings flooding her body. I must have brushed her 15 minutes, and she even let me do her belly and tender bits without a bat of her eyelashes. This is a picture of my reward, a nice bit of dirty goat hair. He he. In all fairness, it IS the softest thing I think I have ever felt in my life. Its currently in a ziplock baggie somewhere in the vicinity of the bucket of Lucy's dirty mohair in the chicken coop. Hair does not have a glamorous afterlife here at Gypsy's Dream Farm as of yet. I've been looking into learning to spin my own yarn, but have yet to cross that threshold.

Second. The goats are happy and wonderful, as always. This pretty much goes without saying, but worth mentioning all the same. Here's a picture of the happy little boogers eating their hay outside the other morning. It was just too beautiful a day to let them gorge themselves in the dark barn, so I dragged out some boxes and put a couple pats of hay outside in the sunshine, which everybody appreciated. You can see that Gypsy, only a few weeks old, is already getting interested in the hay. I have yet to see her actually ingest any, but I've seen her gnaw on a huge dry leaf for 10 minutes before giving it up as a hopeless cause. This is Mumble's idea of how one eats hay. Step one: Get as many body parts as possible in the container where the hay resides. Step two: Get in as many goats' way as possible. Step three: Be sure to stink it up with your scent while you're there because goats are VERY particular about their hay. Heaven forbid we should conserve perfectly good hay. Step four: Enjoy.

Third. Speaking of the goats being happy and wonderful, I have totally forgotten to blog about the fact that Tierra decided all on her own to resume nursing her kids. !!!!! When they were about 2 weeks old, I had gone out to milk Tierra one evening so I could turn around and pour the milk in a bottle for her girls, but when I went to milk her her teats were all small and shriveled up. I pretty much panicked and thought she had something horrible like mastitis and what on God's green earth am I going to feed these three hungry kids?! Well, I milked her as best I could and got enough for one bottle from her, less than half what I had gotten that morning. When we let her out of the stanchion and let her babies free from the stall they had been in (you haven't lived until you've tried to milk a cranky goat while three goat babies are on and off and on and off the stanchion, running under her feet, knocking the milk over, sucking on your fingers, your nose, your chin, eating your hair... generally wreaking havoc) we watched Sable and Gypsy, the two bigger babies, run directly over to Tierra, drop to their elbows, and nurse. And Tierra? She just stood there like she'd been nursing her babies all along! So. Mystery solved as to why her udder was empty. Sneaky little boogers. This is a picture showing Gypsy getting her munch on. Tiny, on the other hand, never did get the idea and I am still giving her a bottle of milk replacer formula three times a day, but since I'm no longer having to milk Tierra I really don't mind. I tried for a week straight, twice a day, locking Tierra in the stanchion and forcing Tiny to nurse from her, but she was more interested in my fingers than anything. I swear she thinks the milk comes from me because as long as I was holding the teat to guide it to her mouth she would suck, but the minute I'd let go she stop and follow my hand. *sigh* I finally just gave up.

Fourth. My Grandma Brosius came to visit and got herself a lapful of goat kids, specifically Poe. She is such a little spitfire (Poe, not Grandma, although she's pretty darn spunky for 87!) I cannot describe to you the energy this one little goat has. We gave Grandma a book, a blanket, and plopped her in the middle of the goat pen where she spent the next few hours watching us attempt to give Louie a hair cut. Fifth. I'm exhausted just thinking about it. Never shave an Angora if you can humanly afford to pay a professional to do it, that's all I can say. This time I actually bought some decent dog grooming clippers, but even they got so dull after doing one side of him that they pretty well pooped out on us. After a while we ended up putting Louie up in the milking stanchion to keep him still while we worked; we must have been at it 2 hours and you can see what we accomplished. Not a lot. Dustin and I took turns whacking away at it, but its tediously slow going. What a good sport. I mean, just look at this face! And the thing of it is he's actually as sweet natured as he looks. He's Dustin's special boy.The (un)finished product. We're still working up the stamina and emotional strength to keep going on the rest of him. Who knew that Louie had elbows?Dustin and a bag of dirty Louie hair. 'Nuff said.
Sixth. I have an update on Tierra's fourth baby, the little buckling! As you know, my friend Lynn took him off my hands and gave him the TLC he required to make a complete recovery from his rough birth experience. I went to her house last week to see him and I cannot believe how big he is! He's almost as big as Sable and Gypsy, who dwarfed both him and Tiny when they were born! He was only slightly bigger than Tiny and now he's twice her size. When I exclaimed over this Lynn told me she feeds him 4 times a day still (I had cut Tiny back to two by then!). So, I believe she's backed off to three a day and I've upped Tiny back up to three because she could stand to be growing faster. She's happy and healthy and spunky, but her brother has just put her to shame. Lynn has named him Chewy, which I think is adorable. She said it was touch and go with him for a while, and she was getting up every two hours through the night for the first week and force feeding him a bottle. It took him almost a week to stand let alone walk, so we even thought he might have some sort of neurological problem. But, he's definitely rallied and my first glimpse of him he was running full tilt around their goat pen kicking his little back legs out to the side, a flashy move all goat kids seem to master. Here's some pictures of the handsome fella. He's got the sweetest little white moons spots and striking facial markings.
Seventh. Tiny has airplane ears. Well, not all the time, just when she looks up at me adoringly, as if to say, "Wonderful Lady From Whom All Milk Flows, could I perchance bother you for another bottle? Or two? Perhaps some cuddles?"Eighth. What blog post would be complete without some random cute photos of my babies, I ask you?