Visit from the Easter Bunny - Spotted Horse Barnyard's Easter Egg Hunt!

 Our Easter Egg Hunt day was a great success!!! We really wished for a little LESS WINDY weather, but at least it was not freezing cold, and in Colorado at the beginning of April, that means a lot.All of us had a great time, and all the visiting families enjoyed looking around and hunting for eggs. My daughter was dressed up as the Easter Bunny, our Korean exchange student as a cat and our little boy as a chickens... it was great fun.

As always, riding the horses was everybody's favorite... even the Easter Bunny's! :-) Look, even Jesse the horse is smiling for the camera.

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Our newest arrivals - baby goats!

We are so excited to have our first baby goats! Our Toggenburg (Dairy) goat Maya gave birth to twins last week and they are SO ADORABLE! :-)
We purchased Maya and her little buddy Celia in October last year from a friend. Maya had just been bred to a buck. Goats are pregnant for five months, and those last few weeks, I thought Maya was going to explode - she was getting very very big and round.
I wasn't home when Maya delivered the babies in the middle of the day, but got home and checked on her minutes later, because the kids were still wet and she was in the process of delivering the afterbirth. One if the little doelings was trying to stand, the other one was tiny and just laying in the straw. It was very cold last week, even during the day, and I took both of them into the house to dry off and keep warm. I then gave both of them a few ounces of colostrum that i had purchased already from a bottle. The bigger one, Mimi, was great and sucked on the bottle vigorously, the little one didn't do very well, she was very listless and weak. I took her to my friend later in the evening, who tried to help by tube feeding her, but we lost the little one the next day. My friend thinks that she aspirated some food during our attempts to feed her.
On the positive side, my friend had already had a few of her many goats kid as well, and we ended up taking a little buckling home who was born the same day as our Mimi. We named him Momo. Momo is a mutt goat, but has all the characteristics of a Nubian, another Dairy Goat breed.

The little kids eat 10 ounces of goat's milk four times a day - they suck those bottles dry in about 30 seconds flat! We are bottle feeding them to get the kids used to being handled by people easier, and because we pasteurize the milk to prevent any infections transmitted through the milk. I had to learn how to milk on the fly! After many times of milking into my jacket sleeves, or loosing "my grip" and getting no milk at all, or having the doe kick up her hind leg and cause me to drop the milk pail, we seem to become a better team with each milking and am really starting to get the job done in just a few minutes. Despite the soreness of my fingers from the repeated milking movement, I enjoy the quiet time with Maya, and bottle feeding the little ones is just pure fun, alas a little hectic and messy!

It is funny how you can already tell their different personalities. Momo is a lot more pushy when it comes to feeding, he keeps getting of the bottle to PUSH PUSH and headbutt me to encourage me to feed him more. Is that a boy thing? :-) Mimi, being a little lady kid, latches on and sucks the bottle dry in one big gulp. She first didn't take as much milk as Momo, but now seems to have a bigger appetite, though they both get the same amount of milk.

Baby Rabbits!

The baby rabbits below were born on October 31st, 2009. Halloween bunnies! We had 12 in the litter, lost 2 pretty early when they fell out of the nest, than two more over the weeks because they just didn't thrive.
Did you know that momma rabbits only nurse twice a day and leave their nest alone all day and most of the night? this is an age old instinct to prevent predators to be drawn to the nest. Rabbit milk is specially formulated to give a young bunny enough energy to last for many hours without a refill!

A litter of baby bunnies - 1-2 days old. These little guys are still naked, blind and deaf.




































































It is now ten days later. the kits now have fur, and their eyes and ears are beginning to open. Despite the way it looks, they are leaving the nest only by accident yet.











































Five days later... see that little guy looking at you? They are now ready to start exploring their world!





























The rabbits are now 3 weeks and a few days old (below). They look like miniature versions of their parents, only more colorful! They will nurse for another 5-7 weeks (until they are 6-8 weeks old), but will gradually start eating pellets, hay, and other foods made available.