No New Zealand Trip for Us. 😢

The excitement of planning a vacation to New Zealand was quickly replaced with sadness when we realized that we would be leaving our house sitter with an untenable situation…

It wasn't one thing that kept us from going, but the culmination of three different situations on the farm that needed our attention. 

We already had two other situations that we felt our house sitter can handle: 

1. Several baby ducks were due to hatch from the incubator.
2. One of our cats was found to be pregnant with two kittens due soon.

These two situations in of themselves were not enough to stop us from going to New Zealand, because we knew she was capable of tending to these occurrences..

The problem that kept us from going was this:

Two days before we were supposed to leave, we noticed that one of our pregnant senior goats, Galaxy, was acting funny and standing alone in the pasture. This is an indication that a goat is not feeling well. So we put her in her own pen. After a quick evaluation Kris told me that she was in labor. It was early March and she was not due until the 1st of April.

This presented us a very difficult situation because if Galaxy has her kids early, then  they are most certainly going to die, according to the veterinarian we conferred with. the baby's lungs are not developed enough if they are born more than a week early.

This is certainly not a situation we want to leave a house sitter with, so after a day of consideration and weighing all possible outcomes, we made the very difficult decision to stay home. It was an emotional decision, but one that we felt we had to make. We knew that our love for our animals would outweigh any disappointment from not going on vacation.

It turns out we made the right decision because Galaxy had three baby goats that were born the day we were supposed to leave. Unfortunately because of their premature birth, even through all of Kris's amazing attention and love, only one of those goats has survived beyond a week.  I am 100% certain that if we weren't here none of the goats would have had a chance at life.

 The first of the three goats that was born died within a few minutes. The other two, through Kris’ medical attention and love were able to survive. We moved them into our house’s makeshift Intensive Care Unit, shortly after spending time with them, we named them Charlotte and Spyder. Charlotte is a moonspotted girl and Spyder is a mostly black boy.

We actually enjoyed spending lots of time with them and feeding them every couple of hours. Charlotte had a little habit of making cute noises in her sleep like she was dreaming. She was one of the most adorable little goats I've ever seen on the farm and I instantly fell in love with her. 6 days later, we had to have a veterinarian come and treat her due to a blockage in her colon. Shortly after the doctor treated her, she seemed to be doing well but then quickly took a turn for the worse. We had to have her put to sleep, in one of the most difficult farm situations I've ever encountered.

In 10 years of rearing goats on our farm, we have never lost a single kid until now. These two hurt really badly. The first one born was terrible and died early before we could get attached. but then Charlotte stole our hearts and lived a short beautiful little life.

I know that if we had gone to New Zealand, I would have never got the chance to spend six days with one of the most adorable creatures that's ever been on this Earth. I am grateful for the time we got with her and happy that Spyder is doing well and getting stronger every day.

At the end of the day. We are glad we put the farm before fun. Although this experience was bittersweet, it taught us the importance of cherishing every moment and embracing life’s unexpected surprises. Good or Bad.

Such is life on the farm sometimes.