Spring Kidding is Over!

Good Morning!  Well, it's finally done.  The 2011 Kidding Season is over.  The final tally was 4 does, 4 bucks.  The bucks have turned out to be really good quality, placing well in the NCDGBA Spring show this weekend.  The last one was due to kid last Thursday, but Michaela's goats are all notoriously late kidders.  This one was no exception.  She was a small first freshener, which was enough of a worry, but she had also been bred to a buck whose offspring had given us plenty of trouble this year.  All of us left home while Michaela attended the goat show this weekend prayed that her late kidding streak would continue.  And it did.  By late Sunday, Eva still hadn't kidded and wasn't even showing any signs she was thinking about it.

My day always starts with feeding animals and cleaning pens.  I had peeked in on Eva as I made my rounds and she was just laying there, chewing her cud, so I continued raking out the goat yard.  Later Ray came out (since he's on vacation, he actually had Memorial Day off for the first time since 1982) and, as we stood talking, we heard a high-pitched "maaa".  When we looked into the pen there stood a brand new goat kid, all dried off and running around.  Evidently Eva had kidded sometime during the night and just continued on as usual.  You gotta love those natural birthers.

May Yahweh bless you in this new day!

Laurie

The Arrival of Summer

Good Morning!  Well, I broke down and did it.  I turned the AC on.  I did make it until noon, but that was it.  After doing the outside work and coming into the house drenched in sweat, I broke.  I tried to tell myself it was for my husband, who works so hard out in the heat all day, and drives in a metal truck with no air, and ends his day working in a metal warehouse with no AC.  He deserves to come home to a nice cool home where he can relax away the stress of the day in comfort, right.  Yeah, I don't think anyone else bought it either.  Not that I don't think those things, but right then, right there, it was me who wanted to be cool.  There was not a dry stitch on me and I wanted nothing more than to feel cool, dry air.  It was totally selfish, I know.  Normally I turn the heat system off April 1 and don't turn the AC on until June 1, but even I have my limits and 93 with a heat index of who knows what is about it.  I had intended to turn it back off at 8PM but forgot.  I'm glad I did.  The humidity is even worse this morning and the sun is heating things up fast.  I'm trying to remember why I bother with morning showers.  Summer is my least favorite of the seasons and it is definitely here.


Well, better get back to the chores.  I want to be inside by noon.  Where I can hibernate in the cool.

May Yahweh bless you in this new day!

Laurie

Oops!!! Our Mistake

Good Morning!  Wow, I had no idea that I had been away that long.  I have really missed blogging and being able to record all of the great happenings on our homestead.  They just seemed to be coming so fast and furious that I couldn't find time to post them all.  Over the next few weeks I will be trying to catch you up on the homestead as well as discussing the current chaos.

Maggie, our beloved Jersey, is currently dried off and awaiting calving.  I am enjoying the break from twice-a-day milking and what seems to be constant cheese, yogurt, and butter making.  On the flipside, I am also missing the fresh products Maggie makes possible.  I find it really difficult to go back to commercially produced food once I've had our own.  Maggie is due to calve on June 29, only a little over a month away.
By the time that gets here I hope to have everything under control and schedules running smoother.

In the meantime I've been busy in other areas.  In early March we were given a blind steer to raise for meat.  He has regained sight in one eye but the other has difficulty focusing.  He's getting bigger every day and now is 4 months old.  The timing was a little bad, since Maggie is dried off and I'm having to buy milk replacer, but I really couldn't turn down meat for the family, even if it is two years down the road.

We named him "Little Bit" because he was so small.  The name doesn't really fit anymore, though.


Then, in late March, the same rancher called to say that he had a two day old orphan bull calf for us.  So we went over, picked him up, and put him with "Little Bit" and named him "Fireball".  Now I was bottle feeding two calves.  At the end of April, we decided that we really needed to get him fixed.  Michaela has an elasticator for use on her goats but, as she said, the rings only go so big.  It took Ray, Michaela, and I to get him turned over and set to band him.  To our surprise, it appeared to already have been done.  We guessed the rancher had someone do it before we got him.  And life went on.  A week or so later, Michaela was out at the pasture when Fireball peed.  Imagine our shock to find that this supposed bull-steer calf was actually a heifer!  In our defense, her naval was very large and covered with a lot of hair.  Add that to the fact that we were in a rush and took the rancher at his word that we had a bull and there you go. 

"Fireball" who has now been renamed "Sassyfras".  We have all had a great laugh about our great level of cattle knowledge.  We actually do know how to tell the difference, but it was a somewhat humbling experience.  I don't think that I will ever laugh at someone else's mistake again.

May Yahweh bless you in this new day!

Laurie