Well, our last dairy goat babies of the spring have come, and they are adorable. Best of all, they bring with them delicious fresh milk!

Right now, the human members of this farm family aren’t able to partake of the creamy feast yet, but our two dairy moms are making enough to feed their own kids, in addition to Napster, the bottle pig, and Pansy, the little runt lamb who’s on pasture with her family, but still gets two bottles a day from us. Goat’s milk is a quite amazing substance, which because of its very small fat globules is able to be digested and absorbed by just about any animal. Goats are great to have around for this reason – you can enjoy their milk for most of the year, and in the meantime have it on hand to feed to any other animal that happens to be sick or compromised.

Goats are also nice to have around because they are friendly, curious and immensely entertaining. Even in the midst of this busiest of seasons on the homestead, I get drawn into watching the kids’ antics at least several times a day. Goat babies are up on their feet immediately after birth and within a week are running, jumping, head-butting, climbing and nibbling everything they encounter. We always like to build the kids a play structure out of logs because they will spend hours of the day jumping on and off it, balancing in the most precarious spots.

Here are our latest, Jack and Bristow, kids to Tapioca. They’ve got little mini ears! Their mom is an earless La Mancha and their dad is an Alpine with great big bunny ears.

Here are Cream’s kids, Bucky and Bronco, sharing some food with a chicken while mom keeps watch.