Meet Nanna. She is a lifesaver. Literally. If you remember, last Saturday when out goats were having all these kids my BF went to buy us a milk goat. Why you might ask? The truth is, while triplet goats are awesome, the chance of one not surviving is huge. Yes, we lost one from our first set of triplets. I am sorry. He went to that big goat bridge in the sky. We talked to our goat expert friends and they told us that a Mom Goat just can not raise triplets successfully. One either dies from being pushed out or the Mother gets her health compromised. Your choices are to take one off and bottle feed it or take it to a sale and let someone else bottle feed it. I don't know why Mother nature is cruel like this. To those of you who read this and have had your Nanny raise triplets successfully, I say,"GREAT!" It doesn't happen for us. Perhaps because of the breed of our goats. But anyway back to "Nanna".
Bottle feeding is not what it's cracked up to be. It's expensive, the babies tend not to thrive as well and they will always consider YOU their Mother which is cute at first but then it gets to be a real pain when they are a demanding 150 pounds. Trust me here. Our compromise was to go out and purchase a Milk goat before we had any more triplets! So the goats are kidding. BF goes out to buy milk goat(a 2 hour drive). Son and I are home watching goats about to deliver and sure enough another one has triplets! We call BF and tell him. Soon enough we see a cloud of dust coming down our road. It's BF driving like no tomorrow on our bumpy dusty road, pulling our stock trailer with Nanna inside. I look at son. Son looks at me. I say, " Dang! When he gets here Nanna will be making butter instead of milk!" Son cracks up and says he was thinking the same thing!
Nanna arrives fine and we set about making her feel welcome in her new home. We milk her for a couple of days and let the triplets get all of their life giving colostrum from Mom. Then we take one off. We give her to Nanna. Well, we make Nanna take her. We still have to go down to the barn every few hours and hold Nanna while Baby Girl eats. But it's working out and all 3 are still alive. YAY! I thank Nanna everyday. She is invaluable.

Triplets on the Homestead

We are getting ready to go into kidding season here on the homestead. This was the first of our group to have her kids. Triplets born on one of the coldest nights of the year. (Murphy's Law of Goats). We had to put these little jackets on them to be sure they didn't get chilled. The one in red is a little doeling. The other 2 are bucklings. So far they all seem to be thriving! Aren't they cute?

My Goat Had Triplets Today!

One of my goats had triplets today. They are the cutest! 2 does and a buckling. This is my first experience with triplets. Normally they have twins. If it's a first time Mom, she will generally have a single birth. I have 25 goats total after today I have 28. We are trying to establish a good size herd. 50 to 100. The funny thing about all this is that we have bought all of our goats from livestock auctions. You never quite know what you are getting there. Our first 10, they told us all had been exposed to a buck and they were pregnant. Only 1 of the ten were. The next little group we bought, out of the 5, 2 were pregnant. Then we bought 7 goats and they said they were not pregnant. One of these is the one that had triplets! Plus we are positive at least 3 more of these will be kidding any time now! We are happy happy goat ranchers these days.

We have one milk goat but we need her to become pregnant before she will freshen or have milk for us too! I can hardly wait as I want to try my hand once more at making goat's milk soap. As you recall from yesterday my first attempts at goat milk soap did not go well.

Like I said, I love the hemp oil soap I made and please go to my shop to check it out!

I told you I was going to talk about how I came about the name Plow and Pony but that will have to wait until later. I may have a vote on names !