Are Vaccines Safe?

While my husband was a teacher, we had great insurance and listened to everything our doctors said. They have a degree & see patients everyday, they must know best.

Then we switched and became kids pastors with no insurance. After looking around at different options, we settled on Samaritan Ministries. With this choice, it meant no more free yearly checkups.

When we moved, I realized that I should probably look to see how my kids are doing on their vaccine schedule. About the same time a new friend shared a little bit of information about vaccines with me. I asked her for more information and she loaned me the DVD set of The Truth About Vaccines. Seeing that it was 14 hours long, I put it in a cabinet over summer and thought about having the DVD set as part of our science curriculum next fall and watch an hour a day.

Well, let's just say we were totally shocked to see this video! It opened our eyes to so many things. My kids talk about it to their friends when they meet up for play dates. This movie was life changing for us and the best science curriculum we ever had. After we are done with The Truth About Vaccines, my kids are requesting to watch The Truth About Cancer. They love it and I do too.

If you are interested in watching the first DVD for free, click on this link. Please comment and let me know what you think.

http://ttaceasternmedicine.online/?a_bid=826cac6b&chan=trailer&a_aid=5d9173be35a8c

After we finish the DVD set, we hope to talk to doctors, pharmacists and CDC employees to hear the other side. Then we'll make our decision on whether to vaccinate or not, or to only take certain vaccines.

One Month Old Kid Goat Care

Our Kid Goats' are FINALLY a month old! 

Since the kids are a month old, it's time to wean them off milk. 

                                         

Step (1) Train the kids to drink milk from a pan, instead of a bottle.  We start training them at about 2 weeks old. (This makes it much easier, and faster to feed the kid goats)

Step (2) Feed the kid (s) half as much milk as you would normally feed them when they are 1 month old. Keep giving them less and less each day. Make sure they have access to as much fresh water and green grass/hay as they could ever want.

Step (3) Once they are off goat's milk, move the kids into their permanent home and/or in with the full grown goats. 

Step (4) You're done! You finally weaned the kid goats off milk! Now you can actually start drinking all of the goat milk!

We Kept 4 Kids

We had five pregnant does and each one of them had at least two kids. So we had a total of nine healthy kid goats, two bucklings, seven doelings, year 2019. We are keeping four of the doelings!

Cinnamon

Miriam (sleeping on one of the (human) kids lap)

Pat

Milka

What Price Did We Sell Our Kids?

The doelings sold right away for $75 each, so we will charge a higher price next year. But it took us a while to rid of one of the bucklings for $50, so we'll keep the price the same for next year. The reason we sell the kid goats, is to pay for the goats hay in the winter. Plus, the faster you sell the kid goats, the more milk you'll get to drink. 

Since the kid goats are a month old, they love to:

 chew on stuff 

nibble on our hair

 follow us around

 jump on our legs & backs

 eat dandelions

suck on our fingers

and

 chew on grass

But their favorite thing to do, is drink milk. It's really funny watching our kids tail wag, while they drink milk!

Make sure to SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube Channel!

Check out 'Funny Clips of the Kid Goats'

How Long is a Rabbit's Pregnancy?

Rabbit Pregnancy

In the fall of 2016 we moved to Janesville WI , and lived in a small house in the city. Our dream was to have animals, in the spring of 2017 someone gave us a free female rabbit. We wanted to have a  rabbit farm business.  In order to make money off the farm business, we had to breed the female rabbits and sell their babies. The first step was to get a male rabbit. We ended up getting a free male rabbit on craigslist, we named him Blacky.

Rabbit Pregnancy Age- Is That a Factor?

We put the male and female in a dog cage, and within a minute we saw our male rabbit breed our female rabbit. Months went by but there was no sign of baby rabbits, it was kind of disappointing. Soon we found out that it took thirty one days for a rabbit to have babies. We think the reason why our rabbit did not have babies is because our female rabbit was five years old.

How many rabbits in a litter?   

 

So we found another free female rabbit, and at the end of the thirty one days it had six babies. One of the babies died because the mother rolled over on it when she gave birth.

This is a picture of one of the baby rabbits.

       
                                             
Once they were four weeks old, we started giving them high protein pellets. 

Here is a good place where you could buy a waterer for your rabbit. We still use this one, only we use it for our chicks!

https://amzn.to/2GGcVE3

Kid Goat Care (Week 1)

Baby Goat Kids

One of our does had babies today, so we are going to show you how to take care of a newborn kid goat for the first week. 

Our doe (Roses) had triplets on 3/28/2019. After the kid goats were born, we quickly wiped of their noses and mouths with a clean rag, so the kid goats could breathe. 

Then we wiped clean their entire body, and kept them warm under a big, warm rag. We waited for our doe, Roses, to give birth to the rest of her babies. 

The first two babies came out fine, but the third kid goat's hind came out first, so we had to quickly, pull the kid out of our doe, and wipe it's mouth and nose so it could breathe. 

Roses' placenta

1st Time Moms

       When most of our does had baby goats, they didn't clean them up after they were born. They weren't to interested in their babies. We think this is because they never had babies before.

So, if you have a doe that has never freshened before, you should try to be there when your doe gives birth, just in case. 

One of our does, Manna, had triplets. The first and second kid Manna had, Roses licked clean. Roses didn't lick her babies when she had them, but she obviously caught on. Now she cleans off every baby goat she sees!

Milking Roses' colostrum

            We weren't there to see Manna giving birth to two of her babies. Manna didn't know enough to lick them clean. If Roses wasn't there, both of those baby goats would have probably suffocated! 

Goat Labor Problems

The last baby goat Manna had came out the worst way. We saw a white tail come out of Manna's hind, but there was no legs coming out! 

Quickly we looked up what to do about that. We realized that we had to put on rubber gloves and stick out hand in Manna's hind to grab the babies legs. 

Did I mention that our parents were gone? We tried calling them and they didn't answer. 

So we had to do what we thought was best at that moment.

We couldn't get the legs, so while Manna pushed, we pulled the baby goat out by the kid goats hind. Since it didn't have air for a while when we were figuring out what to do, it came out dead. :(

But thankfully, Manna was OK.

      After the triplets were born, we weren't sure if Roses was going to have another one. Then we saw a bubble like thing called the placenta hanging from her hind, so we knew she was done.

Placenta Important Info!

Do NOT pull the placenta from your doe, it could damage her insides. We found that out the hard way, but she's fine now.

We put the newborn triplets into a insulated room with a small heater, with the temperature set at 40 degrees.

Bottle Feeding Kid Goats

           Right after kid goats are born, you MUST feed the kid goat the mothers colostrum. If you don't want to bottle feed your kid goats, you should just make sure it sucks off their mother. If you don't feed the kid goat the mother's colostrum, the baby goat's health will go downhill fast. 

Since our doe, Roses, is a first time mother, it was hard to milk her because her udder was small. 

Just to be safe, after our milk pail gets kinda full, we put it in the kid goat bottle. That way, if our doe kicks over the milk pail, the kid goats will at least get a little bit of milk. But so far, that never happened...yet.

Pouring some of Roses' colostrum, into our bottle.

First Time Feeding Goat Kids

       We are to cheap to buy a normal lamb/kid goat, or baby bottle. Instead we just use our old lemon juice bottles. We bought a couple bottle nipples for $5.40. 

These bottles worked great. You just need to make sure to cut the opening on the top bottle nipple a little bit. We found this is easier for the goats to get the colostrum out. 

The first time milking is the hardest, after that it's easy because they are quick learners.

• Put a kid goat our lap 
• Press two of your finger together on the opening of its jaw, to pry its mouth open
• Quickly put the bottle nipple into the goat kid's mouth
• To help it suck, lightly squeeze down on the baby goat's mouth, and make sure that it is getting some milk
• Then keep repeating those steps

Your kid goat should learn how to suck in no time!

Our three day old kid goats. :)

How Much Milk?

      Your doe should give enough milk for their kids. We feed our kid goats until their belly gets a little bulge on each side, then we stop. 

We feed our kid goats twice a day. The internet says to feed four times a day, but we didn't experience a problem yet, feeding them twice a day. And we don't have enough time to bottle feed them four times a day.

Milking Time

We milk our does at 8:00 am and 5:00 pm. Make sure to milk your does at the same time each day.

Kid Goats going by Clint

When Can We Drink the Milk?

           After about 2 weeks, your does should stop giving colostrum and give real milk that you can drink!! 

Don't drink the colostrum, because it tastes awful. Yes, we actually tried it once, and we are not drinking colostrum again! 

Our Saanan/Nubian Kid Goat in the Past :)

If for some reason, your doe is not giving enough colostrum for your kid goats check out the link below...

Kid Goat Milk Replacer

When our kid goats are about three days old, their umbilical cord should be dried up, and it will fall off in about 4-6 weeks.

We hope this helped you!!


MAKE SURE TO CHECK OUT OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL!!!!

Kid Goats first time outside...

Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE to our YouTube channel and our blog!! :)

Our Goat is Dripping Colostrum BEFORE She Has Her Baby (or Babies).

Pregnant goat, dripping colostrum...

In the morning, when we fed the goats, we saw that one of our pregnant does was dripping colostrum. Colostrum is like gold to baby goats. We didn't want it to go to waste, so we brought our doe to our milking stand. It was her first time being pregnant, so it was hard milking her tiny teats, and trying not to let her foot get into the milk or kicking the milk bucket over. 

Cocoa's bag dripping colostrum

We milked maybe a tablespoon or two of colostrum from our doe, so hopefully that will stop the dripping, until she has her baby.  If her bag keeps dripping, we will have to  keep adding to Cocoa's colostrum until we get a baby goat born. We will give you a update later... 

We put our doe (Cocoa) in a milking stand and milked her. 

Hopefully we'll catch Cocoa giving birth! 

Update: Cocoa gave birth to two, healthy female kids about a month after she dripped a little bit of her colostrum.

                   Here's a video of Roses giving birth...

Click here to check out our Youtube Channel.

Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE to our channel, 

and LIKE our video !

Making money... Hatching & Raising Baby Chicks

Our first try on chicken hatchery, we only had: 

• 1 Americana rooster 
• 8 Rhode Island Red hens 

Out of 20 eggs that we tried to hatch in our incubator, only 3 chicks hatched. (One of them was black with a white belly, and the rest were brownish/reddish white.) 

A month later, we hatched another batch of chicks from our incubator. This time, we had: 

• 1 Americana rooster
• 1 Rhode Island Red rooster
• 8 Rhode Island Red hens

Almost all the chicks hatched when we had both roosters. We incubated around 20 eggs and 16 of those hatched into chicks. 

• 11 were black chicks, 
• 1 was was brownish white
• 4 chicks were reddish yellow 

Selling our Chicks

We put the chicks for sale on Craigslist and Facebook. After trying both, we got more calls and messages from Facebook. Facebook also has a quicker response time.

When the first batch of chicks were 5 weeks old, and the second batch of chicks were 1 week old, we finally got a buyer! 

We charged: 

• $10 for each 5 week old chick

First batch of chicks, 4 weeks old

• $5 for each week old chicks





2nd batch of chicks... 1 week old



• So they paid a total of $90 dollars. 

(We kept the 4 Rhode Island Red chicks to increase our flock of hens.) 

The buyer paid more money than what we spent on them! Yeah! Success!!

Our Mistake

But we found out too late that we needed 2 roosters. We culled (ate) our Americana rooster so we could have all Rhode Island Red chicks. Big mistake, because now we can't find another Rhode Island Red rooster.

We can't wait to hatch some more, but we don't want to waste electricity running our incubator with only one rooster. With two rooster's, almost all the eggs hatch... and our hens aren't laying as now in winter. As soon as we get a Rhode Island Red rooster, we'll be back in business!

Advertising Idea

We live on a pretty busy road, so we are trying to make use of that. We are making a sign to put by the road with all the things that we are selling. 

Bad Timing?

Right now (End of February, early March), not many people are interested in buying chicks... 

• It's winter, and people don't want to have chicks in their house. 

• Our local store just got a shipment of chicks. 

• A lot of people don't want to mess with raising chicks, they want laying pullets.  

We also made some YouTube video's on our chicks.... 

Don't forget to SUBSCRIBE to our channel :)

If you hatch and raise your own chickens, you'll end up with some feathers laying round...especially if you butcher some of your chickens. We made a post about why, and how to clean chicken feathers, or whatever feathers you have. 

https://singleincomeliving.blogspot.com/2019/02/cleaning-feathers-preparing-feathers.html

Cleaning & Sanitizing Feathers: Preparing Feathers for Crafts

  

Now I know I have to clean feathers!

How to Clean Feathers

My kids just got into chickens. We purchased some chickens and received some roosters for free. Since we had too many roosters, some had to go into the crock pot. 

The girls thought they could make some crafts with them. They researched different crafts and found out you have to clean and sanitize the feathers first. 

Thank goodness they found that out! Feathers can carry some nasty stuff:

       parasites

       viruses & bacteria 

       lice

       mites

What the mothballs didn't kill, the mixture of rubbing alcohol & hydrogen peroxide will.

Video of my daughter cleaning chicken feathers.  

Supplies Needed for Preserving Feathers:

Feathers
Mothballs
Plastic Bags
Rubbing Alcohol
Hydrogen Peroxide
Large Bowl with Water
Bar of Soap

1. Put feathers in a sealed container with mothballs for 24 hours.
   
2. Put the feathers in a zip lock bag.
3. Add 1/2 cup rubbing alcohol & 1/2 cup hydrogen peroxide to bag.
4. Seal the bag.
5. Make sure the liquid covers all the feathers.
6. Let bag sit for 30 minutes.
7. Have a large bowl with water & a bar of soap.
8. Take a couple of feathers out of the bag and wash them well with soap.
9. Lay the feathers until they are completely dry.
10. Neatly put feathers in a clean/ dry plastic bag.