Thankfully Just a Quiet Day : )

No goat kids today!  Bruce did a serious inventory of the goats and there is only 1 obvious udder. We have more goats to come but not for a few days anyway.  The total of winter kids-13, 10 of which are female and 11 of them came over 24 hours.  They are all doing great today.  We have 4 pens in the dairy barn with families in each, in addition to those that are already in the goat building we use for those with newborn kids.  We went from 26 goats to 36 in the blink of an eye.  There are a few things that are neat about this whole thing.  We managed to get two does, both of whom had their kids die, accept someone elses kids. Goats will rarely tolerate any other kids (we have seen them take their nose and throw kids three feet into the air) but these both showed an interest and, to our advantage, these kids hadn't eaten yet.  Now a set of twins are singles and the triplets are twins and a single.  The single kids really grow with no one to compete with for food.  At 32 hours, the twin that had been found cold and stiff yesterday morning, was trying to jump and throw her head around and play.  There is no way to see these little guys and not smile.  It will be helpful in spring to have kids ready to eat when the grass is growing.  Generally by the time they are ready to harvest our pastures are slowing down. The major theme otherwise for the day was being tired.  Bruce announced during morning milking that there would be napping this afternoon.  For those who know Bruce know that would be unusual and by noon his list had erased that possibility.  Before breakfast was done we had a heifer have her first calf, a female that happened to be stillborn.  Always frustrating but the reality is if you have livestock you will eventually have dead stock. Once we asked our vet Marc "why" and he said "if you can explain why 99.9% are perfect then I will explain why .1% aren't".  Really, any live birth is a pretty amazing thing and especially in nature, I am in awe of the instinct of survival. Other adventures of the day were filling a feed box with haylage out of the silo we rent at Ed's.  Other than the dairy barn itself, we have cattle in a building here and also in a yard we rent from Ed.  The heifers here get fed in a feed box and at Ed's there is a silo that has a bunk where the cattle eat. I am excited to have added my first pictures!!!  They were supposed to be at the bottom  and not the top but they are there and I am ok with that : )  The first 2 pictures are of twins.  The one we found stiff and cold was standing in the tote 2 hours later.  Bruce is also holding her.  Perhaps his pocket would be good reference for size. She is the smallest, even smaller than any of the triplets!  The triplets are in the last picture, taken before I rubbed them down and they had a chance to warm up. The brown one has the  new mom.  Today they are all fluffy with pudgy bellies!  Hoping for an uneventful evening and an early bedtime : )