I've Got Friends In Low Grassy Places....

Our dear friends have a property that is large enough that they grow their own hay.....and allow us to buy beautiful grass hay at a reasonable price.  This week the process is beginning; and it will allow us to fill our barns to the brim with hay that should get us through a few months.  We were also able to barter for some desperately needed bedding hay!  A luxury for us right now since quality grass hay has been running nearly $9 a bale, not a speck of it can be used for the chickens or pig.  Our chickens will have soft fluffy lining in their nest boxes again now, in exchange for getting a butcher goat off to freezer camp!

For those of you who have followed my blogs for a while, you may remember our hay day back in July of '08.  I would have loved to have helped this year....but thanks to my large slobbery friend Grace and my night blindness I ended up with a broken hand Friday night.  The bones aren't broken, but the cartilage is...faster healing but the hand is still worthless for a bit.  If you catch typos in this post, blame it on her...but how can anyone get upset with such a beautiful face? 

We've had a lot going on here....including MORE new additions!  Our cockatiels Edward and Abby are the proud parents of 2 little aliens!  Here is the handsome couple..if you look closely you can see the little fuzballs....

That was 10 days ago...here are how the twinkies look now...

Edward and Abbie aren't nearly as protective of them now, so it's easier to get pictures.  :)

We have added a new rooster to our meat chicken project.  Our original rooster, Angus died a few weeks ago...and although we have his son from the first generation crosses, we wanted to add some new blood and color.  We were able to trade one of our RIR roos for him.  This boy has no name yet.

Our next addition is a new barn cat.  Well, he will be a barn cat once he gets big.  One of our local feed stores had a litter of wild kittens running around outside and I was able to catch this one and bring him home.  Of course the only reason I could catch him is because he was so sick.  Because of his questionable background, and need for an eye patch we named him Captain Jack Sparrow.  He started off pretty sickly and covered with fleas....

After a week of doctoring him he looks pretty good, he's not wild any more, and he can drink his weight in goats milk every day.  For now he's living in a crate in the milkroom...once he's big enough that the rats don't carry him off, he'll be in charge of the buck barn.

You never know what kind of things can happen on a homestead.  Toss in some goat kids and you REALLY have no clue what can happen next.  Fiona is my favorite goat kid out of my favorite goat.  She's a one of a kind marked kid...a very special beauty.  And she knows it.  She is the barn princess and by golly everyone knows it.  So she has this way of getting by with things that would never be allowed ordinarily.  This has made her somewhat mischievious and boldly curious....

Don't let that beauty and charm fool you.  Yesterday she nearly gave me a heart attack.  I was out giving one of the babies their mid-afternoon bottle and heard Fiona crying from down near the woods.  Of course she hollers at me any time I go outside and forget to give her a snack or say hello.  So I hollered back....usually by this time she would be right next to me looking for a treat...but she was not in sight.  I called her again...she hollered back.  This went on for the two minutes it takes for Frodo to down his quart of milk...and still no Fiona.  By this time I was worried.  Very worried, because her cries were more cries than her usual complaints.  After a few minutes of searching I found her.  I found her face first in the bottom of this culvert on the side of the cliff next to the scrap pile.....

Of course me...with a broken hand.....was helpless to rescue her.  I always keep my cell phone in my pocket for just such emergencies.....and I thank God that Bob was on vacation so he was home to hoist her out of her predicament.  Keep in mind this was a concrete culvert in the hot sun in 90+ weather.  She is a 5 month old, 72 pound goat stuck head first in a frying pan sized hole at a 45º angle about 3' into the tube.  Not an easy rescue, but I am happy to report that only her pride was injured.  A big bottle of milk and a handful of treats made the stress go away. 

And now for the how-to portion of this blog.  How to weigh a fat baby.  When we weigh goat kids, we put them in a large stock pot...they curl up nicely and usually stay still. 

Today my daughter and I were wondering how big Rylan is getting.  Sooo, rather than folding my grandson up to put him into a stock pot....we used a roasting pan.  Of course we put his squishy comfy changing pad in the bottom of it first....hit the tare button on the scale....and viola we had a handy-dandy baby scale!

He liked it so much he cried when we took him out!

10 weeks old, 14# 10.6 oz with clothes on.