Sorrow and Joy

Last Sunday was a big day here at the Hill farm.  Daisy, one of our goats, started showing signs of labor on Saturday afternoon.  So we spent a long night checking on her and waiting for babies.  Well...nothing happened.  So on Sunday we went out to the shop to work on a project Jeremy had for work.  We checked her several times as she was definitely in active labor at this point.  Just before 1130 we abandoned our work in the shop and went to assist Daisy.  Her first kid was born breach and still born.  It was heart braking to see that little tiny body limp and lifeless.  The best we can figure was that he had been dead for a while because he was much smaller and very stinky.    However within seconds she was pushing out the face of another kid and to our absolute elation the little nose was twitching and sniffing.  This kid was born in just minutes (maybe even quicker). We worked with her to get him cleaned off but he just did not want to stand and he was shivering a lot.  So we brought him in the house and milked her quickly so he could get some colostrum as soon as possible.  Once he was completely dry and warm he stood up and was a perky little goat kid.  He was quickly moved out to the shop in the kid pen (but not before he peed on my shower mat).

For the first few feedings the little guy, who has now been named Oberon (explanation to follow), needed help latching onto the bottle and we had to hold his head still so he wouldn't pull off the nipple.  Now though he just latches right on and is drinking lots and lots of milk.  He is much cuter then the below picture shows.  He didn't want to hold still for his photo shoot so its a little blurry but just know that he is SO ADORABLE in real life.

This is little Oberon after his first feeding when he was literally minutes old.  

So most of you are probably wondering about his name.  You may know that his daddy is named Romeo.  So we decided to follow suit and use names from Shakespeare.  So who knows which play Oberon comes from?  Anyone?  Well as much as I would love to keep you guessing I feel that it wouldn't be nice.  So, Oberon is the king of the fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream.  This is a play that I loved in high school so it was the first play I thought to look at for choosing names.  I am not sure if we will be holding with the Shakespeare theme for the girls since both of our current girls have cutesy names but we have a couple of weeks to decide and even then who knows, we might get both boys again.  We are hoping for two does from Cocoa but who knows.  

So even though we were totally heart broken that we don't have two little boys to show off in this blog but we appreciate this happy healthy baby so much and we love his little kisses and his little noises and as soon as his mom's milk is usable we will have wonderful yummy milk to drink and make cheese with!  (I will blog later about our plans for this years milk)