Goats, Not Snakes

Okay, back to the promised goat pictures! 

Keith has now gone to Ames to pick up his dad, play nine holes of golf, and proceed up the highway to Mobridge, South Dakota, where they will fish to their hearts content with a guide on Wednesday and Thursday.  Having planned this trip for months, I asked him to please go ahead and go, and he agreed.  They are going to have such a good time!  Two avid fisherman, with a goodly time to talk about things... I envy them. 

He has no camera with him, but the guide will suposedly take pictures, so we may get something to see instead of just fish stories! 

Kody and Kaycee will be seven weeks old tomorrow, and are growing fast.  They love to come out of their pen and play on the furniture in the pasture, and follow me around.  They love to go in the henyard and spook the hens, and look into the popholes to see what's happening inside.

You can see Kaycee's little horns in this close-up... they are growing daily. 

Little by little, they are starting to sample grasses, weeds, and mulberries on low limbs of our tree to see what things taste like, though we are still getting four bottles a day. 

Here we are last night, on our way to the mulberry tree.  The high grass to the left is on the pad we made for a barn about six years ago.  The four posts for the corral were put up, and the barn project was abandoned. The dirt scooped to make this pad is what became the place for our little pond, that is filled in now, because of the limestone ridge under it. 

I cut a path through next to the goat yard so we can go back and forth.  

There is always someting new to look at or taste. 

This mulberry tree is where Beau, my palomino pony, and Lacey, our little white mini mare, used to lay. 

We call it "Beau"s Tree"... and under it are buried Addie Mae, Gwen, Nickie, and Hannah. 

The little guys are just getting the idea about chewing on the branches, and this morning, we have already walked out once in the pasture... they actually ate the mulberries hanging on the low branches, and some that had fallen on the ground. 

I love mulberries.  When I was a little girl, my neighbors had one in their yard, and half of it hung in ours.  I couldn't wait every year for the berries to get black and ripe.  

Then, because it was a "dirty" tree, they took it down. 

I am so glad we have four here, two in the front yard along the front fenceline, and two in the pasture.  

YUM. 

The little guys found the ripe ones this morning, and we were all pretty quiet as we stood there eating. 

After we ate some mulberries, it was time to check out the chicken yard. 

Those two pictures were taken last night, and they wanted to know why they couldn't see inside the door! 

Then they got to do something they had never done before... they got to go see Keith as he got home from vacuuming straw out of the HHR, since he took it to South Dakota this morning.  They were very curious, and really wanted to roam around, but it was time to go back in and wait for the night bottle. 

We scooped them up after I took this picture. 

Abby and Lilly like the goats and get along with them, but Ranger is big, and wants to play with them.  They are tiny compared to him, so we are very, very cautious around all three dogs. 

I'm going to order collars for them this week; breakaway collars that can easily come apart if they are hung up... and also their immunization vaccines.  

I checked their hooves yesterday and they already need a tiny bit of trim! 

 

There they go up the pasture!