What Love Looks like

This is what love lookes like. It starts at six times a day (at least a couple of them in the wee hours) warming bottles of milk and heading out to the kids. And to have the milk to warm means milking. That's only twice a day, but for us that means Six AM milkings. The first couple of nights, I just slept out in the barn with the kids. Sleeping with the kids reminds me of my two year old son. Sometimes he wakes up in the middle of the night and since he is awake, we must be too. Climbing on our heads, yelling in our ears, prying off our eye lids. The difference between my son and goat kids is hooves. Baby boys feet aren't sharp and hard. And Baby goats don't wear diapers, so when they pee, it soaks through your sleeping bag. Just a hypothetical , of course. Until it happens. And then, well, at least they will be well imprinted.




















At least it is warm enough that I feel secure having them sleep in the goat shed with their mothers. Probably would have been fine all along, it is the end of April, after all. But Ruffles the Doe goat was a little gruff with the babies, particularly the buck kid that was not her's. And Sparky, well, she can be a little clutsy. For a goat, she's kind of addle minded... And, well, they will have a good imprint with humans now.


The Doe (on the right) can actually go right through the cattle panel, it's more of a suggestion to her. But she doesn't generally care to. The buckling, on the other hand, thinks nothing of going places he shouldn't. I was hoping the electric fence would be enough to keep him in, but alas, no, he needs a physical reminder, hence the plastic fence around the poly wire to keep him in the paddock.

This is the expanded Goat Shed. I added two more panels to the north side of the existing shed. The beauty of cattle panel structures, I suppose. We are adding three more paddocks so we can have more seperation in our rotational grazing. The north and south paddocks will be five strand new zealand style electric (high tensile smooth wire, permanent). the space in between is strung with three strands of poly wire, a plastic "temporary" fence. It carries the same current as the new zealand fence. Sparky has more than once told us it still packs a wallup. I touched it myself the other day. It's still "hot", but not as potent as the new zealand fence.