What a day!

Mama and I have had a busy day. The day started with the discovery of three newly hatched Bantam chicks - one of which was already on the ground with a very protective mother hen. We have no idea how it managed to survive the fall from the little chicken house to the ground. It is only about thirty inches of drop, but then you are only an inch tall that is an impressive distance. The other two chicks were safely deposited in the nursery tote with the chick that hatched in our incubator last week. It has not enjoyed the company.)

Then we headed to Bowie to pick up the truck we left with the mechanic last week. I had two dog crates in the back of the Sequoia because we were going to pick up a nanny goat and her twins from our goat farmer friend in Bowie. The nanny is the mother of the little girl we got a few weeks ago but the little one we took was the smallest of the triplets and might not have survived if we had not taken her home to be bottle fed. Unlike in the Disney movies, there was no recognition of reunion when we got them all together. It was really disappointing.

I headed to the church soon after I got home because I try to spend several hours per day on the marketing business I am working to develop but I had to shorten those hours today because we got off to a late start and we were scheduled to meet a buyer at the farm to sell our baler.

It turned out that I could have spent a good deal more time at the church on the internet completing more of the assigned training because the buyer arrived about two hours later than he had predicted. By the time he did show up Grandpa and I had the baler hitched up to the tractor and had run two bales through it by taking the loose hay from the round bale the cows are eating and feeding it into the baler. 

That was good practice because Grandpa and I ran three more bales through the baler when the buyer did arrive so we could show him how to operate it. He was very thankful for the demonstration. Then we schemed on just how to load the baler onto a trailer that was too narrow for it to fit. 

We ended up backing the baler onto the finders of the trailer by parking the trailer against the berm of our little pond in order to give us a downhill approach. Using ramps made out of lumber I had on hand Grandpa slowly guided the baler into place.  It was a tricky process and if we had not had Grandpa to do the maneuvering I do not think we could have succeeded; in fact, I am sure of it.

Grandpa and I were worn out by the time the buyer, Marco, got the baler secured to the trailer and felt it was tied down safely enough to make the four hour drive to his home. Overall, the loading process took about two hours. It was 7:45 before I got to sit down and cool off enough to finally take a shower and relay a bit.

After feeding the goats their bedtime bottles it was almost 9 pm.

Then we thought about the little chick in the Banty coop.

So I changed into some farm pants and got down under the little chicken house and lifted the hen off of the chick so we could put it with the other chicks in the makeshift nursery. Without that rescue it would have died within a few days - in spite of the mother hens attentiveness.

Lots of work but so many blessings in the process.

Oh, life with Mama.