New Life on the Farm

We had just finished discussing the Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in our Sunday School lesson.  It's a familiar teaching of Jesus in Matthew that explains the final judgment in which the sheep will be separated from the goats.  For those not familiar, the sheep are the righteous who will be blessed and the goats are the wicked who will be damned.  If you have kept goats, you might understand why the goats are the "bad guys" in the parable.  They are always getting into trouble.  In fact, we have one goat that we nicknamed 'Devil Goat' because she is so mischievous - wicked, you might say.

But goats have a loveable side, too.  We've been really watching Callie closely these past days.  We don't have to look hard to find her.  You see, Callie has a loud voice.  She's always bleating, letting us know that she has a grievance of some sort.  She's been pregnant and her bags have gotten so huge.  We were expecting her to kid every day now for about two weeks.  We'd leave her in the barn and then  hurriedly go check on her each morning at 6AM... but no baby!  We even began to wonder if there could be such thing as a false pregnancy?

But then one morning, we saw a large mucous discharge, followed by little feet poking out!  Callie's finally in labor.

Suddenly, plop!  And a baby is on the ground.  Tricia cleared away mucous from the kid's face so as not to inhibit breathing.  Callie went to work licking her baby to get it all cleaned up.  I got in the middle of things, lifted a leg to determine the sex of the baby.  It's a little buckling.

Callie has these strange markings on her face.  She's mostly black, but her face is a wild, unscripted, hodge podge of black, brown and white markings - almost like a puzzle.

Like they say, "The fruit doesn't fall far from the tree."  Callie passed her "busy" face on to her little boy.  Take a look at this:

It's so confusing, you can't even tell where his eyes are!  One thing that's not confusing is the fact that we need to ensure that the little dude gets some colostrum in his belly.  Tricia positioned the little fellow beneath Callie's huge teat, squeezed some colostrum into his mouth, and the sucking reflex by the little guy instinctually began.

The next morning, he had colostrum poop all over his backside, giving us evidence that he got the good stuff inside him, giving him the best shot at a healthy beginning of life on Our Maker's Acres Family Farm.