A Birthday Gift of a Challenge

aka: How to Give Yourself a Milk Bath in the Barn

In our endeavors to eat and grow wholesome food, some challenges must arise to grow us (or *me* at least!) both in wisdom and humility. Sometimes vegetable seeds don’t sprout and sometimes foxes quietly swipe freeranging hens. I’m thinking that those wonderful hobby home or farm photos in magazines with the rosy sunlight filtering through trees over the rooster’s bright feathers are really not telling the whole story, because truth be told, if the whole story was told, no one would grow or raise anything. I’m not even sure a toddler would keep trying to walk if she knew she was going to fall on her hiney half a hundred times either.

Our latest challenge involved our Kinder milk goat. She freshened with her first kidding successfully, giving us three handsome bucklings (and yes, I’m still learning all those fancy words!). Anyhow, turns out one of the bucks would rather chomp than suckle. All breastfeeding mamas are now cringing, yes?

So we were trying to gently milk our doe without causing her pain in her healing teat. Which meant I could not hand milk her. It was a pretty stressful situation because she was full of milk but not getting milked out by the bucklings anymore because I separated them overnight to give her a break. I didn’t know what to do! One friend recommended I put together a makeshift handpump and another (bless her heart) recommended a breastpump. Which I had in a dresser drawer! Dumb thing never worked for me so I don’t know why I kept it.

Anyhow, here we were working together. I am holding the cup on the doe’s teat, my daughter is holding her legs because she doesn’t want us near her wound, and my son is working the pump. And, oh yes, my husband had grabbed the camera to join us. The doe could otherwise care less about what we were doing because she had a face full of grain to enjoy.

Now, don’t you “longing to homestead” mamas dream of waking in the morning to use breastpumps on milk goats? Grin.

Well, it worked!! Well….sorta! The main trouble was that the bottles were small and the pump itself backed up with milk because goat teats hang and human ones don’t. So my son pumped and pumped until we relieved her udder a good 15 or more ounces of milk…and then the milk bath began. The milk backed up through the line and my son got rained on. Oh my. We laughed SO hard as my son would just ham it up! Is that called “bonding” with my children or what?!

Everyone’s happy now. Bucklings are sold and will be off to new homes soon. Doe is healing and providing a good amount of milk in the morning (which we are currently giving to the happy dogs until she is completely well). And we are now the proud new owner of a very overpriced but works-well Henry Milker. If any of us are unable to handmilk or if any of my does have sensitive teat issues, milking can still happen with this dandy hand milker. No more milk baths for my son! And no more hair or dirt to strain out either! It’s pretty cool. But again, seriously overpriced, which is a bummer. I never would have bought it if we hadn’t been going through this, but I’m glad we have one now.

Later that afternoon, I caught my daughter reading a book while baking me a birthday cake. She was making a buttercream frosting in this photo. I couldn’t believe she was reading at the same time! And not even a cookbook!

It’s hard not to have a nice birthday when challenges in homesteading can be met and overcome together with my children. S’all good.

Blessings,