Bottle Babies

It has been a crazy house lately. We have been bottle feeding 40 baby goats, round the clock. This involves lots of time, sleepless nights and stress. It is much better now, after 2 weeks, because the babies can go for much longer, and tolerate the cold far better than when they first got here.

Working the farm is a struggle for mom to observe. She has lifelong experience with working on a farm, but now it is just too much change all the time. I try to keep her involved with the goings on, by sharing with her where I am going and what we are doing next, but it seems to make things worse.

My husband and I decided that instead of having her know about the comings and goings of the farm, we would give her a couple of babies to take care of here at the house. It is cute to see her coddle them. Imagine her hovering behind each baby goat, as it walks around the livingroom. She is holding a tissue for any accidents, and the goat is kicking up it’s heels at being warm and fed on demand.

This has been a great opportunity for mom to get outside of her own head. She has been talking a lot about her house being sold, the health of her stocks and how much she misses being alone. We are finally talking about building the new house on the farmsite, finding out what sort of comforts she would like to have. I think the idea of change again, is so much harder on her.

It is really difficult to fit all of us together in the family puzzle. Does anyone have tips to share?