Comings & Goings

All of the kids are starting to go to their new homes. It is always a bittersweet time of year. Two of Dakota's kids went to their new family together a couple of days ago. I'm very happy when siblings can go to new homes together. I know they are not human and probably don't think anywhere near like we do, but its nice that they can stay with one another. The family is new to goats, but they are very willing to learn and have been doing their research. Plus I sent them home with a packet I spent hours working on for people who buy any of my goats and contact info for my veterinarian. They haven't called me yet with questions, so I assume all is going well. They sent me photos of their kids sitting in a wagon with the pair yesterday. I think the doe kid will turn out very nicely for them if she ends up anything like her dam.

I am keeping her third, and smallest kid from this year and she is a little gr

umpy having to spend her nights with her half-siblings out of Jolie. I put her back with mom during the day because I figured the extra milk will help with her growth, so she is content with that arrangement, and she is helping me stimulate Dakota to keep producing since I can't always keep an exact 12 hour interval milking schedule.

Firelight Ranch LadyNThe Water

I shaved her last week and set her up. I'm disappointed in her lack of a brisket, but aside from that I think she is shaping up to be a nice little girl, especially for the awkward growth stage she is going through. As a quadruplet she is very small for her age, but in the past couple of weeks she seems to be attempting to overcome that and start shooting up. Hopefully she'll end up a normal size, she will definitely have the nutritionally help to get there.

I sold Tomahawk today to a girl from up state. She is going to use him to cross on Nubian does and breed some Mini-Nubians. I'm actually a little jealous as I'd really love to breed some of them in the future, but I'm perfectly happy with my Nigerians. I'm glad to be able to keep a daughter of his, and hopefully I'll have one more to retain when Poit kids next month. With all the sales in the last few days, I have enough money to completely pay for Latifa and a big chunk to go towards my bred Camanna girls.

Those are all of the photos I have for now. I clipped both Dakota and Banshee today. I didn't have time to take pictures, but I should have some time on Wednesday. I had to be extra careful with their clip jobs as I have no time to allow their coats to grow out any mess ups. I had to wait SO late before the show to clip because of this weird weather, but it's definitely warming up this week. I'm so very impressed with Dakota. She looks awesome and her udder is beautiful. I can't wait to see how she does in Salem next weekend! It will be my first doe show and I'm nervous about doing things correctly. I'm also nervous about both Banshee and Jolie doing well. I've been having some reservations about Jolie, but I also feel they may be due to her going through a growth spurt. Her kids really brought her down at first, but she has put on a lot more weight and grown a bit more in the past month. Yet her rump keeps shooting up as soon as her front end catches up to it, so she still looks awkward. Her udder is very, very nice however. Banshee is so tiny and really straight in the rear legs, not enough angulation there....but she is a really nice doe otherwise so we'll see. Her problem is keeping her feet still.

I'm uber pumped for this weekend trip! Not only is it a show, but it is going to be a mini vacation for my husband and I at the same time. It is a two day show, so when I'm not in the ring or waiting on a class we can do some relaxing and sight seeing. :) I'm also bringing the last doe kid I currently have for sale. I have one woman interested and supposedly driving a whole seven hours down from Washington to the show for her, but we'll see. There is another girl who is very interested who will be at the show from the forum I frequent, but she isn't necessarily set on her and if the woman from Washington is really going to come all the way down she will have first right of refusal. She is a doll, so hopefully she finds a new home there.

I'll have another post with clipped photos of the girls soon, and show photos as well although I'll probably feel too fat to not clip myself out. Lol.

More Posts

I know I'm posting an awful lot lately in comparison to usual, but I actually have more free time lately. It is so very nice to have some time to just relax, to spend extra time with the goats, and to get caught up on projects! In fact, right now I am working on a couple of belated Mother's Day gifts. One for my mother and one for my grand-mother. I didn't have any time Mother's Day week due to being a florist.

I am making them a couple of custom My Little Ponies. It is a popular hobby amongst some circles. You boil the ponies, pop off their heads, rip out their hair and rub off their paint with nail polish remover. Then you can either use the base color, or dye them. You can then paint designs on them and add clay pieces. Most people then re-hair them with higher quality hair than the original. I buy a very satiny, almost real feeling hair called "saran." It's a bit spendy but it is beautiful. I'll have to post some photos of them when I am done, even though they are not related to the goats or horses.

I thought I'd post a few more photos of Fae that I took today. She is now two weeks old and very bouncy. She is an extremely adventurous little kid. She spend most of her time in Poit's pen playing with her rather than with her dam, even though Poit is certainly no kid. But Poit loves her and tolerates her climbing all over the place.

As I said, she thinks Poit is the best play thing ever. I really love Fae, I just wish she loved me. She is terrified of me! Honestly though, I have spent very little time trying to play with her. I find that newborns need you to spend as much time as possible in that first week of life to be very accustomed to you. She was born at the worst time for me to give her that attention with the chaos of my job. And of course I had to disbud her before I had much of a chance to get her used to me, so now I'm the devil. To top that off, she had a very goopy eye yesterday. It was just covered in eye goop and glued together, so I took her inside and cleaned it up and flushed it, so she just figures I'm a beast who likes to torture her. Luckily it seems she just got something in her eye, because it is fine today. It was red and irritated last night and I was worrying about pink eye. Then my own eye tweaked out this morning and was weepy so I started wigging out that whatever it was could have somehow infected my own eye. Of course it was just my contact being mad at me and both Fae and I are back to normal in the vision department.

I have been talking to the owner of Bellafire about purchasing a jet black doe they have named Latifa. She had her listed for sale quite awhile back and I had asked about her then, but she decided she didn't really want to sell her and kept her. She put her back up for sale last week and let me know, but also said she was giving the breeder first shot at her. The breeder has not replied, so she has marked her on her website as "sale pending" to me. So I feel pretty secure in announcing that we will be purchasing this pretty doe. She is just beautiful, very dairy and angular. She will hopefully be bred to Goldenbrook Farms MR Fireworks, who is a beautiful, very wide and deep gold buck with blue eyes and moonspots. I've seen the kids from the exact same cross this year and they are stunning. I think a buck kid from her would be a very good prospect for me.

Bellafire NIC Latifa

(Poppy Patch Nicolodeon x Purple Camas Farm Zena)

She has a gorgeous udder. Apparently she does not like to show, at all, and she fights on the milk stand. Traci loves her but is very into the showing aspect and wants to find her a home where she can be a brood-doe only. I'm excited! I don't know if I'll be able to pick her up with my doeling out of Peggy or not if I want her bred because she may need a little more down time and I'd end up with kids in the middle of winter. But at this point I may end up with kids around January anyways out of Prayer, a doe I'm getting from Camanna. So I'm going to be having to set up some winterized pens in the barn anyways.

Bellafire ? - New Doeling

I just had to write another post with a couple of photos of my new doeling from Bellafire Farms. I believe she will be ready to come home in mid-July.

I LOVE her color. Those diluted, reddish markings are so wonderful! Look at her rear leg angulation. She already looks so level and long at only a few days old. She knows she is sexy, posing like that. Ha ha.

I disbudded Fae today. A bit late, but they hadn't broken the surface so I believe I caught them in time. Usually I will disbud doe kids from multiple births at a week, but singles always seem to be more developed at birth and need it done sooner. I always do bucks kid in three to five days after birth due to their horn buds already being so developed.

I got an email from Camanna today asking if I'd rather buy a couple more bred does in place of my kid reservations. I'm seriously considering it. I really like the first choice does I have selected but am not quite happy with my second choices (although they are all bred to the two bucks I really want kids out of.) It would be amazing if she would let me choose which bucks they were crossed on, and I could choose to breed one to Lucky and one to Monet. As long as they are both very nice does with nice, proven udders I would have options for a buck kid from either. Prayer is nice enough but I have only seen her first freshening udder and Moondoggie is too young to be proven as a sire yet to keep a buck kid out of the cross.

Jolie is already looking better! I shaved her almost two weeks ago and she looked pretty thin. She had such a shaggy coat this winter. I kept feeling her bone structure and it felt like she had enough fat cover, but she just looked so dang skinny after her coat was gone. She is also in a weird growth stage with her butt up in the air, so she looks really ugly right now. She was bred a bit earlier than I intended and I think her kids are bringing her down a little. Her FF udder is absolutely beautiful though. Near perfect in form and shape with a very respectable capacity for a first time mom. I moved her to my dad's house the day after I clipped her and upped her feed considerably over a few days. She is already fattening up and I hope she evens out over the next few months. She may be for sale in the future, but I want to give her a chance to mature some more before I decide. With that udder I would love to keep her in my herd. The only thing wrong with her conformationally is that her front end seems a little shrunken and is definitely downhill. If it is just a phase I believe it is something she can grow out of. She isn't quite a year yet after all.

-Jolie's udder 12 Hour Fill-

Can I RELAX Yet?

This last week was Mother's Day week. I'm a florist. It was hell. Mother's Day is pure insanity for a florist. People assume Valentine's Day is the craziest of the year, and it really isn't. I get wire orders over my computer from 1800 Flowers and I always have to shut it down one or two days before the actual holiday. I just run out of flowers and time. I end up getting three or four hours of sleep a night for five or six days and arranging flowers until ten at night. Normally I would get a good two week break afterwards, but I have a full schedule of classes my last term of college with the same professor and she is a slave driver (and a complete moron.) All I know is that this coming weekend I am just going to hang out with my horses and my goats and relax in the sun.

I got some photos of my boys all clipped up. I am very, very happy with how Gizmo is coming along. He is now registered as Tualatin Acres Opera Ghost. He has a white mask that reminds me of the Phantom of the Opera, one of my favorite movies.

He still has a lot of growing to do. You can see the wrinkled skin over his shoulders. It is really loose and it feels like a puppy that needs to keep growing into himself. He is nine months old, so I expect him to gain a little more height and fill out through his yearling year. He is uphill and has nice length and depth of body with a level top-line. His biggest fault is a lack of a brisket, which he gets from his dam, but if he also gets her beautiful udder genetics I'll be happy. He isn't really good at setting up, so I'm lucky he behaved this well. I think he was a bit tense and could have looked a bit better, but I'm happy with this shoot. He has super correct legs when viewed from the rear, perfectly straight in every way. I see so many bucks who at least toe out, such as Tomahawk. Unfortunately I didn't have the opportunity to show him (or Tom) at the Megabucks show because of the holiday and my job. I don't know if I will get to show him this year, since all of the other shows I'm planning on are doe-only. In any case, I am ridiculously excited about his future kids! Plus he is a loving little doll.

I was able to get a good photo of Tomahawk. He looks much nicer than he did going through his funky growth stage. Yet there are some things I don't like about him. I love his length of body, which really doesn't show well in this photo. He is uphill and very sharp over his shoulders. His dam definitely improved on his sire, but you can still see his sire's major faults in him. Mainly a lack of rear leg angulation and a steep, kind of strange looking rump. And then there is the fact that he toes out behind. Not much, it is very slight, but it still irks me. His dam has a pretty nice udder and I think he is a good herd sire for someone with plenty of does strong in his weak areas...but I just don't think he is right for my herd. I have several very nice does coming in and hopefully a new buck kid soon. I don't have room for too many bucks, so I am selling him.

Sherry gave birth on the very first of the month. I was honestly not expecting it, but then it is hard when you have no clue on a due date. The evening before, her ligs were pretty mushy but still there. I figured she would go the next day some time, but wasn't concerned about that night. She still had some filling to do in her udder as well. I clipped up her udder and when I put her away her ligaments were tighter. I got up in the morning and stepped out on the deck and saw a kid in the pen. I immediately wondered how Westley got out. I had put Jolie's kids up for the night with Dakota's kids so she could fill over night. Jolie's kids were continuously in Sherry's pen and the little kid was just as big as he was and marked similarly. I then realized the colors were off and ran down to the pens. Sherry's ligs were coming back and she had passed the after birth. The kid was already dry and bouncing about and half of Sherry's udder was deflated from being nursed on. She gave me a single doeling. I was surprised by a single out of a doe that had quads every single year, but was very happy for a little girl. She is absolutely gorgeous. Level, dairy, elegant, beautiful legs...I'm just beside myself over this girl. And with dad's flashy white to boot!

I have been calling her Fae. The first thing she reminded me of was an elf with her huge ears. You can't tell in this photo, but they are like airplane wings. I thought elf sounded dumb, but fairys are pretty and have pointy ears. So Fae it is. I think she will be Roc N Ewe Faery Lights if I am correct about the ranch name that needs to be used. Definitely my most exciting keeper of the year.

Lady is growing like a weed. All of Dakota's kids are. They are six weeks now, and only a couple of weeks until two of them go to new homes.

These kids are great examples of what Tomahawk can produce when crossed on the right does. Lady is long and level and very refined. I adore her pixie-like little face.

-Dakota's buck kid, Tramp, says hello...-

My first reservation of the year panned out in a beautiful doeling. She is such a strange color, but I'm ecstatic. She is a traditional buckskin, yet the black markings are diluted to a dark red. She literally looks apricot colored. It is very awesome. She was my second choice doe, but now I'm very happy when hearing about her udder that my first choice doe didn't work out for me. I have at least a month to wait for my next reservation to kid. I've also been offered a pure black doe bred to a gold and white buck with moon spots and blue eyes. I definitely plan to accept should she decide to sell to me. At this point it is tentative as she hasn't made a final decision. She also offered to allow me to use the same buck to cross on a few of my does, which would be more than amazing. If it all pans out, I will have photos next post. I should have pictures of my new doeling in the next week.

And some clipped photos of Sherry. Now this is the evening before she kidded. So she is starting to get posty and is dropping out her rump, although its not super noticeable in this photo. I am very happy with this doe. She may have an old school, blocky head, but I like her build. She has great capacity, a smooth top-line is uphill and she is wide and deep. She also has a very nice udder, although I will have to work at it to get it full to capacity. She only had a single and I haven't milked her at all yet, so her production isn't very high at this point. She is really lacking in the brisket department, but she is a very nice girl. I'll breed her next year, hopefully to the gold and white buck I mentioned. After that she might just turn into a very friendly pet as she will be an older girl.