What a week. Christine’s mom came to visit and also hoped to catch a birth.
Sunday around 4pm Felicia went into labor. We thought, okay, Kissy labored for six hours and that seemed long so Felicia would surely have St Patrick’s Day babies! 9pm rolled around with very little progress and having gotten very little sleep for a week (happy one week birthday to the Mini LaMancha twins!) I suggested we go to bed while Christine’s mom kept an eye on the goat camera. 1am rolled around and she let us know nothing was really going on so she went to bed. I woke up at 3:30 and checked on the camera…all good. Watched until 3:50 and went back to sleep. Christine woke at 4:30 to check the camera and yelled out “She’s pushing!” so we jumped out of bed, she woke her mom and peed (I said, really, you’re going to pee? LOL) and we ran outside. It could not have been more than 5 minutes that we took. But there were two babies side by side. Christine suctioned them out and we helped Felicia dry them off.
We immediately noticed how much smaller they were than Kissy’s babies (different breed, so we should have expected it, but these are TINY) and how they too have white caps on their heads like the other two (same dad).
We especially noticed that one was less than half the size of the other one. Both babies were much weaker than the other babies had been and the buckling needed extra care (selenium, Vitalherbs, Lobelia, and Cayenne). He also could not suckle at first. To be honest we thought he was a goner. I talked with the breeder I got both mama and papa from and she told me to bring him inside, keep him warm, and try to get some colostrum from the mama into him with a syringe. We did NOT want a bottle baby but she assured us as long as the baby got the milk from his own mother she would not reject him (they sniff their babies’ bottoms and can smell their own milk in their poo, thus recognizing them as their own babies). It was Christine’s mother who brought him inside and started talking to him, soothing him, convincing him to live and to suckle on her finger and then eventually on the syringe with the nutrients he so badly needed inside. Thank you, Jesus. He has turned out to be quite a fighter. The names we picked out for the babies before they were born are not fitting so Christine said we should call this tiny buckling Bruno because he looks a little like a gorilla and there’s that Bruno Mars’ song “Gorilla.” It’s his little face shape, poor little guy, not the cutest look, but maybe he’ll grow and change a bit as he gets older.
I told my breeder he couldn’t even be a pound. She told me, no, she’s been breeding several years and the smallest she’s ever had was 1.1 lbs. So I stuck him on our meat scale to find that he weighed 1.149 lbs. Wow. He honestly doesn’t seem like he was ready to be born and doesn’t seem developmentally with it yet. He has some odd tendencies but it seems he is quickly growing out of them.
So our last two days have been having him inside with us (he sleeps in a pile of blankets in a dog crate and hangs out with us on the couch, too. He’s currently curled up in my lap sleeping away) and taking him to his mama several times per day for milk. Today he’s gotten strong enough to get milk himself without needing us to take him right under the teat and move the bag so that he could reach better. He’s definitely getting stronger. He cannot run and hop around like those other twins (nor can his sister, for though she’s stronger and bigger than he is they just don’t compare to the other babies). We did try yesterday to leave him with his mom but she was trying to lay down and accidentally stepped on him very hard which made both him and me scream loudly and that was the end of that. We will leave him out there as soon as he gets big enough for me not to worry so much.
Are we out of the danger zone? No, we aren’t. With a baby this small, anything could happen. All we can do is the best we can do which is a new thing for me as someone who can be quite hard on myself.
As for the other twins, they have grown substantially and they have been able to enjoy the sunshine the past two days.
I have realized watching the first birth and dealing with the babies of this second one that I have zero desire to ever breed animals again. This also came from me going to a cow dairy two weeks ago to get milk. I get so excited about the walk-ins with all the dairy products…you can grab out milk, cream, cheeses, ice cream, so many delicious things. My first thought while I was grabbing all the products was “We need a cow!” and then I realized, NO, we do not need a cow. We do not have to do EVERYTHING. We do not have to produce all our own food (which is a sad realization but we are just already so overwhelmed). We can rely on and support neighbors who have the products we love and need. And that’s okay. We need to all help each other out and why not support a nice local farm with raw dairy? Especially knowing that I don’t have time, space, or love for a cow (they terrify me).
And then I’ve come to some bigger realizations, like that I don’t enjoy life these days. I loved living out here when we first got here and when we had a minimal amount of animals/responsibilities. But it piled up and piled up and become so stressful and so impossible feeling…endless lists of projects and hours of daily chores. And I remembered that I never wanted to do this alone, I had wanted to do this as a COMMUNITY. But it’s also been very difficult navigating what we desire in terms of community.
When Christine’s mother was here over the weekend we went for a walk the whole length of our property. We hadn’t done that since we closed on the property a year ago (it’s because of the snakes and overgrowth that we avoided the second half of the property but now with the winter grass it’s safer).
What we found amazed us. HUGE fields of dewberry bushes, enough to sell at a farmer’s market booth and also eat and can at home. AND…guess what…a PECAN grove! Seriously! What a wonderful find! Also something we could sell or keep for ourselves.