Now we're truly Indigoat farms! Baby Indigoat is almost two weeks old now (she was born last Tuesday). Kiah went into labor at 4am. My father had put a baby monitor out there and could hear her making noises, so he went and looked at the infrared security cameras that were monitoring her little enclosure (paranoid, much?). Anyway, we all rushed out there and got our neighbor, Kenda. After about an hour my mom reached in and pulled the hooves out (they come out hooves first, then the head) and the rest happened pretty fast. There was only one baby, but it was a girl and we were all ecstatic. I think my friends at school were happy that it was over so I would stop talking about discharge and heavy contractions and goat birth in general.

Anyway, Indie spent the first night with her mother, in an enclosure outside of the pen. That turned out to be a good idea because the baby tried to nurse on Eve once and Eve almost trampled her.







At first we tried alternately bottle-feeding her and giving her milk in a bowl because we read that letting her nurse would be hard on Kiah's teats and could lead to infection. Bottle-feeding also gave us control over when to wean her and let us see how much she was eating. Unfortunately, as you can see in the picture, she didn't enjoy bottle-feeding much and we had to get up early (as you can see in the picture of me just out of bed) to struggle with her. It wasn't very pleasant, and now we've decided to just milk in the mornings and let Indi nurse during the daytime. It's a lot less work for us that way, and the mother and daughter are so cute together!

We've had TONS of visitors, and we've even started using the publicity to sell eggs. We had our first egg sale last weekend, and that money's going to help us offset the cost of food and cheese-making supplies. After we let the collostrum run out we tried Kiah's milk and it make us (well, at least me) really excited about making cheese and yogurt. Anyway, Indi is the cutest thing I have ever seen in my life. She follows us around the house and likes to stand under chairs and tables because they remind her of her mom. She also makes a great fashion accessory.






Here's a link to even more cuteness from our neighbor Emma, who's also on the milking team: http://shirley.haoclan.org/2010indigoat/index.php?id=10