Gardenia gave birth to three boys and a girl this afternoon. All seem healthy.
I spent two and a half hours blow-drying them off and in that time only the girl (the biggest) nursed although the others wanted to. Gardenia has kidded before and was a great mama so I suspect the blow-dryer was spooking her. I decided to give her some time with them and I'll check on them all later. Even the smallest of the four wasn't that tiny.
I spent a little too much time in the stall not moving around and ended up with a bit of frostbite on my toes. Owee!!
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so sorry ...
this is really throwing me, all these kids not making it. We all put alot of effort in this for that to be the outcome. -(
I declare everyone needs a wool sweater for their babies..... ^^
I'm so sorry, Marin! It can be tricky when they get hypothermia after the newborn stage. I've never had any trouble saving a newborn with hypothermia, but we had an experience with an older kid that didn't turn out well. Our buck pasture here flooded six years ago, and we rescued everyone, but there was a six-month-old that had hypothermia, and although we got him warmed up and thought he was on the mend, he died two days later.
You've had a rough time latey! After this year, it will all seem easy!
sounds like you need a woodstove ^^ that's what I use for heat instead of heater. When we lose electricity we have heat, just no water. -(
I have been using a heat lamp 250 W sounds like I could save some electricity $$ if I bought one of those.....
Hope all your kids pull through!
The stronger of the two kids we brought in is back out with his mama who didn't even seem to notice he was gone; she took him back with no issues whatsoever. He just needed a bit of heat, some milk to energize him and then a couple of hours in the house to make sure his temperature was fine. The much weaker one has improved and will take a bottle, but is still pretty wobbly and will be spending the night in the house. I did stick my fingers in their mouths when they came in and oh my goodness was it cold in there.
Oh no! I'm so sorry! You are having a very rough year! If you put him in warm water, it will bring his temp up. Using a plastic bag might have slowed down the heat transfer, although I can understand that you might not want him to be wet if your house is still really cold. It might take 20-30 minutes, but it works eventually. If you wrap him in a heating pad, that works almost too well and too fast. I overheated a kid like that once. It's not a problem if they're just laying on it because heat can escape through the part of them that is uncovered. If you stick your finger in their mouth, you can get a good idea of whether or not their temperature is right.
Deborah, yeah, next year I'm planning on having all kiddings happen in March/April.
Melissa, the heat lamp is just your standard chicken brooder lamp. I believe it's 150W bulb.
Last night was a long night. The power went out for 8 hours and we don't have a back-up source of heat for our house (main heat is geothermal, which runs off an electric pump). The heat lamps in the barn also didn't work of course. We now have two very chilled kids in the (still chilly) house. One will be fine, the other I'm not sure about yet. I don't have a stomach/feeding tube here so I've been spoon-feeding him as he can't suck. He's swallowing so I don't think it's going into his lungs. I put him in a plastic bag in warm water to try to bring his temperature up, and now he's on a heating pad looking pretty limp. Hoping for the best. We'll see.
Melissa Johnson said:
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