Relaxed Farming - our farm in your classroom

Another day with no news of Thyme! It is now very obvious to us that the owner of the billy who mated with our pygmy goat girls did not give us the correct dates for their matings. If they were correct Thyme would now be getting VERY overdue as we thought Onion was. She is starry-eyed a lot but is obviously in no hurry to give birth and as long as she is eating, drinking and behaving normally, we won't worry!! We are now getting very close to the expected due dates for the dairy goats (and we know these for definite as these matings took place on our smallholding). In our experience dairy goats tend to kid only a few days after day 145 and for Pickle day 145 is in two days and for the twins, Cheddar and Gorge (picture shows Gorge) it is just six days away!!!
We have to be very careful in the middle of all this waiting and excitement to continue to keep a careful eye on all the other animals. Just because we are so involved in the goats at the moment doesn't mean the other livestock conveniently start looking after themselves and not needing us!! This afternoon we noticed that one of the lambs (right hand picture) was not quite right: he was crying (a sign he was in pain) and lying down. He is the lamb who was born without an anus opening and when we examined him it became obvious that the problem was to do with his poo. (If you are squeamish, you may not want to read on...). Whilst the little chap now has an anus opening, we think the muscles around it are not as developed as they should be and this means he cannot always push to get his poo out. It looked as though he had a bit of a blockage which fortunately we were able to sort for him. The effect was instant as he ran off looking far more comfortable and no longer bleating - this is something we obviously need to keep an eye on though.
Another problem we discovered today was that our second broody Muscovy had cracked one of the eggs she is sitting on (or something else had cracked it when she was not there). The result was a VERY wet nest with several eggs covered in sticky yolk. Eggs are porous and so a worry was that the sticky yolk which was starting to go bad and smell, could find its way into the other eggs and take with it bad bacteria that could kill the developing chicks. We got some warm water and carefully wiped the eggs clean before toping up the nest with fresh bedding and hoping that we still have eggs that will hatch. This duck is only on day seven of her 35 days incubation period so we have a long way to go yet. Fingers crossed the eggs will all be okay and carry on growing...