ok -
4 are doing well
1 is teeny tiny and has a strong suckle reflex, even though she can barely get her mouth around the teat...so she is, I think, getting milk...
sometimes I think she is not getting any milk, but she latches on for so long and looks 'satisfied', so I think she's ok
but the teeny one (bigger than teeny tiny) is not demonstrating strong suckle efforts - hard to get him to even TRY to latch on... although he has a few times
he is now probably about 9-10 hrs old...
how do I know when I need to step in and bottle feed him some...
or do something else....
his momma is letting me milk her a bit (I was checking to make sure she was producing well) so I probably could milk into a bottle with a pritchard nipple...
Replies
Yes, your plan sounds good. Most kids do not take to the bottle naturally, so you do have to pretty much force it on them in the beginning. Even when completely bottle-feeding kids, you only have to do it four times a day after they're a few days old, so you'll be able to feed them when you're back to work. One possible problem is that when kids are with mom, some of them will continue to fight taking the bottle. After losing a few like that, I will take them away completely if they give me a hard time about taking the bottle. There is no way that a little one can fight for those teats when they have two big siblings. And I've had some really spunky littles one in the past. I'll never forget the one who was the first one up and nursing in a set of quads. She almost died two days later from starvation because the big kids were knocking her off the teats.
I started bottle feeding this afternoon, with colostrum from the mama - she very graciously let me milk her...
I used a pritchard nipple; it was difficult to get the two tiny kids to drink from the bottle - I basically forced it on them and got in as much as I could each time.... I did this in the barn, sitting on the ground near the mama and the other goats...
these two little kids ARE more successfully nursing over the past 6 hours -- they both seem more able to latch on for a bit, and most importantly the teeny one has started to actively seek the teat and seems to 'want' to nurse... earlier he did not...
is it ok if I keep bottle feeding the two little ones every 3-4 hours during the day, but also leave them with mama since they are certainly actively nursing with her, and she is giving them lots of stimulation and attention by licking them a lot - she seems to be more adept at handling them than she was the first 4 hours or so... learning curve I guess.
if they are napping too long, she wakes them and licks their face and their bottoms until they move in to nurse for a little bit, then she lets them go back to sleep...
we do want to keep them alive!
i don't have to go back to work until friday night (and I'm trying to trade that away) so I can be with them in the barn pretty much all the time... except I'm exhausted.....
Deborah Niemann-Boehle said:
If I were in that situation with first fresheners and a tiny kid, I would absolutely take the tiny kid and bottlefeed it. FFs don't make that much milk, and a tiny kid has everything going against it anyway. They don't usually make it more than a couple of days, two weeks tops, if left to their own devices.
oh, by the way
we think they kidded a couple weeks "early" unless we miscalculated:
Espresso had 3 babies
and
Carreleche had 3 babies - teeny tiny seems to be less than 2 lbs! maybe I'm wrong
and teeny seems to be maybe 3-4 lbs... they are really small! can walk, stand, lie down but much more unstable on their feet than the larger kids which are about double their size (or maybe 75% bigger)
we've only done this once before, 6 months ago (and those two are doing terrifically!) - so we don't have a lot of experience...
Carreleche (milk face - in Spanish) is the one with the struggling babies; she is mothering actively, but not quite as well as Espresso is....