My Evening Ritual

Every evening things get frantic around here.  After I’ve done chores and everyone has finished eating and feeding their kids, the girls head out to pasture.

There’s usually a few that stay up in the barnyard.  Annie and Millie had respiratory infections and don’t like walking that much.

Millie and kids

Maggie doesn’t do well with heat and humidity, and sometimes new moms want to stay near their kids.  I don’t mind, and I give them some hay.

Maggie and Chip

It’s also good for the little ones to start munching on hay.  It helps to get their rumens functioning.

Lolo

While I’m out there, I try to take inventory of all the kids.  We have forty kids born in 2012 running around.

The three from March I don’t really worry about.  Max is big, almost more like one from March than May.  The other thirty-six I really try to account for.

Max

After a couple of rounds trying to find them all, I head out to pasture and see which kids I can find out there.

On this trip, I was looking for three kids~Ken, Justin, and Sandy.

Dolly and Ken

Haley and Justin

Once I see who is with their maa and find that I’m still missing one, I head back to the barnyard and do some more looking.  Finally, I find the little one.

Sandy

Then I make bottles and feed the five bottle kids.

Cindy Lou

After that, it’s time to milk Millie.

Millie

Then I head back to the pasture to make sure they are still bringing their kids back with them.

It’s really important for me to know where the kids are because for the first time ever, I have moms trying to leave their kids in the pasture.  I do not approve of this.  Always, they’ve left them in the barnyard until they are a couple of weeks old.  By then, they can keep up with the herd.

Nancy and Nick

Recently, I’ve had to drag moms back to the pasture to make the holler for their kids.  Once they put that baby somewhere and tell it to stay, I can’t find it.  It won’t answer to me, so I have to have the mom to find the kid.  For the first time, I didn’t get all the kids up to the barnyard last night.  Vinnie brought her kids back this morning, but I still haven’t seen Blaze’s baby (I had to go to a meeting and couldn’t follow them), but she had been nursed.  Haley left her baby in pasture again this morning also.

Blaze

Blaze and Haley are getting shut in tonight after they lead me to their kids.  They won’t be going out again until their kids are old enough to keep up with the herd.

Goodness, these goats are wearing me out this year.

Linking my wordy post to Wordless Wednesday with Project Alicia, Live and Love Out Loud, Sarah Halstead, Create With Joy, and Tina’s Wordless Wednesday.