Aloha.  It's continued to be a busy week.  We are down to Erin, Daniel, Teo, and I working outside as well as Eva of course.  It's been slower around the farm being at the end of kidding season and all but still it's more difficult to be able to do extra projects outside when your alone outside.  I have to say I enjoy working outside alone.  I can organize and time things out for myself and keep busy.  However, yesterday was a long and more stressful day.  We unfortunately have a lot of fire weed  growing in Golf, one of the milking herd's day pastures, which is a toxic invasive species.  It's not like the fire weed in Alaska that's purple but it's a pretty little yellow flower that looks nice but is a pain in the butt when it's all over our pasture.  We are organic in that we don't use sprays on our pastures or growth hormones and so it was Alice and I's extra job to pull these weeds out.  I certainly don't mind weeding, having to do a lot of gardening with Mom and Dad when I was younger, but between doing all the outside chores, noon feeding, feeding hay, and milking in the afternoon I didn't really have much time to make that much of a dent in the fire weed.  This weed is native to Madagascar and they're not sure how it got introduced to Hawaii but it's become a big problem being very toxic to horses and cattle.  They brought in moths to kill it but you can still see quite a bit of it upcountry, etc.  Hopefully we can weed it out of our pasture ASAP.  Yesterday was almost even more busy when Holly (one of the last 5 on maternity leave) started isolating and pawing, showing signs of labor behavior.  Her udder has also become very full.  I put her in a stall and around 6 pm she started up a lot of baby talk.  I was SURE she was going to give birth that evening but I checked her this morning and she's still holding out!  Maybe by time I get home we'll have some newborns. 

Not a whole lot else is going on.  Easter's coming up and I'm really excited for the holiday because Eva asked me if I'd like to take a couple kids to the Westin Villas in Lahaina for an Easter event.  Sunday is my day off but I was hoping I'd get to be the one to take them.  I'll take lots of pics : ) 

Hello readers!  Another week gone by and I'm back to my favorite coffee shop in Maui blogging.  It's been a busy week at the farm as usual.  More babies have been born and we're down to 6 mamas on "maternity leave"!  It's hard to believe we're almost done with the kidding season.  The yearlings still have yet to give birth but that won't be for another few weeks or so.  It's kind of weird/funny to see them getting all big and pregnant and developing udders.  Does can start getting pregnant at 10 months.  I remember seeing them as little guys when I first arrived at the farm and here they are getting all grown up and about to have babies of their own!  Is that what it's like to be a parent?  Haha.  

Well the two does that stick out in the last week have been Rosalee and Alexandra.  Or should I say pain in the butt one and two...these two are part of the "pond girls" who have formed a goat clique.  That's right, like humans goats form cliques!  I hadn't realized they were moved to the dry herd because it was on my day off and when I went back to work I kept seeing these three goats hanging out together far away from the others.  That's weird...what are they isolating together??  Nope, just doing their own thing as outsiders.  Ok so they can have their own club if they want but they have to take it a step further and be the three escape artists.  They continually jump up on the feeders in the pasture and jump out then just graze where ever they want all day.  It's gotten to a point where we just ignore them and let them do their thing.  So Mandolin still has a bun in the oven but Rosalee and Alexandra gave birth within a day or two of each other.  Weird...Kaitlyn and Gertrude (the two besties) did the same thing.  Not only did they give birth at a similar time but they both keep escaping to find their kids.  Because we hand raise the moms will have a couple days or so of calling for their young.  Most moms let it go pretty quick I've seen but some, like Scout, seem very interested in everything baby.  So these two are found walking around searching for kids and let me tell you its not that easy to move a determined mother when she's set her mind on looking for kids.  Thank god for Ghiradelli.  Teo even found Rosalee roaming the barn at midnight!  She heard a goat from her room late that night and knew it couldn't be Nancy who's in the sick stall so she went out of her room and sure enough there's Rosalee who escaped from Manhattan.  Guess we know the electric fence doesn't work haha.  If we turn the electric fence on the day pasture it's not so bad because the two will go off with the rest of the herd and graze for the day however Alexandra's udder is very swollen on the right side requiring DMSO and hot compress massages three times a day...meaning we have to keep her on a pasture nearby.  O boy....is she loud.  Hopefully she gets better soon!  

I booked my flight to Alaska today meaning my leaving soon is becoming more and more of a reality.  I made my list of things to do before I leave so I better get to it!  It's too bad the picture above doesn't give the sunset we had yesterday at the farm justice.  This may just be the most beautiful farm I'll ever work at. 

Well it wouldn't be an original Kate Huff blog if I didn't start off by commenting on how behind I've gotten on blogging but let's cut to the chase and let me start by saying WOAH BABIES!  What's with these goaties and having babies at the most inconvenient times?  I secretly love it though.  The last time I blogged I was saying how I had reached my goal of being here at the farm.  Well the very next morning I had the best morning I've ever had there.  What made it so good?  BABIES!  The night before I was commenting on how it seems like the goats know when I have my delivery days and plan their births while I'm gone.  It's like they heard me because that Thursday morning they decided to have all their babies in the window of time I work outside before I leave for deliveries and it was great.  As the morning milker you have to check the dry girls (or the ladies on maternity leave I like to say) and see if anyone is isolating or acting funny.  Well surprise surprise there was a momma (honestly I can't even remember who it was haha) with two little nuggets born already.  So I get her up to the barn and put the babes in the hay stall until Eva or Alicia can take over.  I see Cookies isolating so I go and grab her and put her in the stall.  It's 6:30 am and I'm already dirtied with afterbirth....this is what I work for : ) So I start milking and Alicia is keeping her eye on Cookies who ends up poppin out 3 during milking.  Somewhere in all this mess I think Eva got another goat who had kids.   At the end of milking I put Cookies on the milk stand to milk her out and get the colostrum and put her on the goat walk.  As I'm rushing to get sanitation started and Alicia's feeding newborns and runnin around I hear the all too familiar grunts of a mama having contractions and pushing.  That's weird...maybe one of the new moms is passing her afterbirth.  I glance over at the goat walk and there Cookies is pushing out a fourth baby!! Our first set of quadruplets for the season.  Holy hell where did this goat fit all these babies?!  I run into the goat walk and pull the baby out as she's pushing and Alicia grabs a feed bag.  I think this may be the most memorable birth haha.  Below is a pic of Cookies, the baby, and I right after I pulled him out, you can see I'm putting his face to hers so she licks him off.  You can see the other ladies on the goat walk are very interested in the kid..."surrogate mommies" as Alicia calls them.  Alicia took over since I had to finish up milking duties and get Fed-Ex going for deliveries.  Since there's no grass or straw on goat walk she wrapped the baby up like a taco in an old grain bag.  I couldn't help but take a picture.  I'm so thankful Alicia and Eva were working with me.  By 10 am we had 9 new babies.  It was a wonderful way to start the day even though it was hectic and busy.  Teo now has the day off on Thursday until she takes over delivering so she and I have been going to Napili after I'm done.  Nothing like enjoying some tropical drinks and sun while watching the whales in the bay.  We also saw spinner dolphins for the first time since I've been here. Since then we've had a pretty steady trickle of babies being born up until this week where we've had a lull.

            Alicia using the goat weight tape so she can figure out the proper dosage of dewormer.

                                                               A baby grain bag taco!

                                                        My lovely Teo from Romania : )

                                Haha sometimes Eva's responses in our com book crack me up

Sunday was my Nalani day as we've gotten in the habit of trading off treating each other to breakfast after church and sometimes making stops afterwards.  The other Sunday we went to the famous Grandma's Coffee House in Kula.  Afterwards Nalani took me to the lavender farm which I haven't been to yet.  It was BEAUTIFUL.  The views upcountry are unreal.  They have a little trail you can walk around and see the different areas of the garden.  There are so many different plants there.  My favorite were these ones that were greenish leaves but they looked like roses.  I also love the proteas.  There are definitely some of the most beautiful flowers I've ever seen here.  Fresh plumeria smells so great.  I really want to see the prickly pear flowers bloom and silversword on Haleakala (one of the only places in the world it grows!) before I leave.  I'm not sure when prickly pear's bloom here but fingers crossed.  Finally we stopped at the farmer's market to pick up some fresh stuff for our girl's day get together later that night.  There's so much fresh produce here.  It makes me sad knowing I'll never have avocados as large and delicious as here.  I'm determined to find a way to bring some home ; )

When I got home I saw Alicia bottle feeding the smallest baby I've seen yet!  Even smaller than little bit.  This wee one was premature.  Goats, like cats, are capable of getting pregnant twice at one time...meaning they can release another egg which can be fertilized.  This goat had gotten pregnant and had another egg release meaning this little bun in the oven didn't get to bake all the way.  This doesn't happen often and as you can imagine the survival rate of these little ones isn't very high.  Unfortunately he didn't make it 24 hours but I can tell ya he got the most 24 hours of love a little goat can get.  We gave him all the strong names we could think of (Zeus, Thor, I personally liked Benjamin Button) and gave him lots of snuggles.  The tough part of working in the animal business.  After Alicia got off her, Jasmine, and I went to get kombucha and stopped at the temple of peace to check it out.  That night all us women on the farm plus Daniel celebrated girl's day and it was the most fun pot luck we've had on the farm.  We ended up going around the table and saying who we thought was the most feminine haha and generally enjoying and celebrating women.  It was decided that being feminine can mean a wide range of things.

Not a whole lot has been going on besides feeding kids, taking care of goats,  and doing the whole daily farm work thing.  Teo took over deliveries for Tuesday yesterday which was weird.  I'm so used to seeing the people I deliver to every week but I have to admit I'm not bummed out at all.  I got my fill of deliveries and I'm looking forward to spending more time with the goats and workin on the farm.  I've been doing a lot of mornings lately and I feel like I've been really involved in the goats taking care of them in the mornings, milking, and giving shots, etc.  Daniel and I had a crazy Monday and it seemed like no matter how fast we worked we couldn't keep up with the day.  We both ended up working an hour over.  We had a BBQ that day and had to make sure the barn was clean and ready in case of rain and as I mentioned earlier the goats have impeccable timing.  Primadonna gave birth that morning, which I was happy about because I had grabbed her from the herd around 6 when I started and was hoping I made the right call.  Peanut who was acting weird earlier in the day also ended up giving birth around 2 pm when we get off at 2:30...I swear she did it on purpose haha.  I had to sing "peanuuuut peanut butter....and jelly!" (my siblings know this one)  to her when I went into the pasture to grab her and she was not happy with me being put in a stall.  She made have had her baby at a terrible time but poor thing had one huge baby!!  Perfect little buck if you ask me.  It's hard to tell in the pic below but he's a giant kid.  The first pic is Sookie the goat...with 200+ goats now it's important to keep everyone straight and sometimes they'll lose their collars like Sookie did.  

                                                                             Rugrat!

                                               Mom and baby chicks right outside Safeway

                                                                  Peanuts....brazil nut?? 

                     Goats enjoying Thoma's leftover movie popcorn.  Who would've thought

Work, work, work...I ended up going overtime yesterday as well because I was determined to get this tarp done in square.  Eva has taught us a method on how to put a big tarp up by ourselves and per usual I was thinking what?! I cant do this alone and sure enough she was right and it actually went well.  I was able to do it in an hour...which I'm not sure is good time haha but I was proud of myself...even though it took me a few terrible tosses of a rock on the end of short string attached to the tarp to realize it'd only make it to the other side if I use a long string.  I swear sometimes I can't think anymore!  I feel so comfortable and on top of things here now and I can really see why they require a minimum of 6 months.  I think it takes that amount of time to feel like you know what your doing..well...for the most part haha.  As you've heard there are always curve balls or days you feel like you don't know anything.

I've been pretty good about putting myself on farm lock down and not going out too much but I couldn't resist going to Lahaina with all the girls last Friday for a surprise BBQ for Chris (Erin's boyfriend).  Daniel was nice enough to trade shifts so I could work in the morning and leave afterwards.  It was a blast.  I had my first intense food fight.  Erin made this great cake that was a replica of a sod heart Chris made for her (he's in landscaping) and we all ended up throwing it at each other and making a huge mess.  I worked with cake in my hair the next day since I worked at 6 am haha and I still have cake all over my clothes and necklace.  Friday happened to be my laundry day!  We had to do a cat in the hat style clean up before his roomies got back but it was worth it.  All in all fun BBQ and he was surprised : ) 

                                                                       SGD girls!

Time is going wayyyyy too fast!  This morning Kelly and I dropped Alicia off at the airport to head home.  She was at the dairy for 7 months and I won't forget my first day at the farm and waiting for her get off work.  She left me a treasured item...her overalls!  So expect a lot of pics of me in those bad boys for the remainder of my time here haha.  It's so hard to say goodbye in these experiences.  I was a ball bag when I left Alaska and I'm sure it won't be any different when I leave Maui.  Living and working with people you start to forget what life is like without them and it'll be really strange to not have Alicia in the shed next time me.  I mean who else is gonna do the young girl dance with me??  On the plus side when you meet people from all over you gain connections and people to visit all over.  So when all is said and done it's a small world and you never know you may end up getting to visit them at some point.  But shout out to Alicia, you'll be missed!!