Today has been a better day milk wise! I looked up what time the sun rises here and the Google answer was 6:31, so I set our alarm for 6:15am and planned to milk at 6:30. Turns out that Google wasn’t entirely accurate and the sun was already up when I got up so we got our milking supplies and beelined out to the barn. Sorry children, sorry dogs, sorry horses. Kissy first.
The goats were excited to see us and Kissy almost ran herself to the milk stand. She hopped up by herself, I think she knew we could help relieve her, and she started in on her grain. Apparently it helps to mix the grain into the alfalfa hay so she has to dig around and look for it which gives us a little extra time.
We still did not have success with the pump but we were able to somehow hand milk over 2 cups worth! YES!
I mean, that was better than last night, Kissy had really good behavior about it, and Christine and I make a good milking team…one of us will pet her and tell her sweet things and the other will milk and then when that person’s hand cramps up we switch off. Actually my hands haven’t been terribly sore, I’ll pretend it’s the cello and aerial silks but we all know I’ve not been keeping up with those things these days, so it must just be a bit of good fortune. I did purchase turmeric black pepper supplements to make sure our joints won’t be overly achy. Christine is always the one who wants to use the machine and I’m like “No! You’re wasting time with that thing…let’s just do what works!” But she’s been giving good effort with it.
We felt pretty decent about a bit over 2 cups but I still felt badly for Kissy; I certainly remember the days of painful engorged breasts. So we agreed to try again at lunch time.
At 11am we got over 3 cups worth! YES! We finally felt like we got most of the milk. This is partially due to the fact that Maggie (the breeder) had mentioned we should practice using the pump on our thighs. Christine messed around with it, it turns out the thing never goes past 7 whereas Maggie’s pump goes up to 10 for milking, but we did get it to start suctioning properly. Scratch that, Christine did. I was still thinking we were stuck hand milking (which honestly is more glamorous to me, but I do sometimes like to torture myself with things unnecessarily, so…). Well what do you know, Christine got the machine to work this time and we probably hand expressed 1/3 and got 2/3 with the machine. I was elated!
No picture of the huge lunch success, but have some cute goat pictures instead. We finally started tackling the blackberry patch now that the goat fencing is done and we took them over some cuttings. Goats love to eat prickly things…
