Dolly’s Delivery

Hey guys, so at 5:34pm on Friday we started noticing Dolly acting agitated, and uncomfortable and just showing the signs of pre stages of labor. Well at midnight she finally had them, but it wasn’t very heartwarming as the others.

So Dolly has always labored slowly, she takes her time. Well since she has always labored like that we didn’t think anything of her slow progression. She lost her mucus plug around 5:00 normally that just means they are close to delivering.

Well as time ed making it 7:30pm.. still there was nothing. She was just really slow at everything. Her contractions were about a minute apart, but still nothing.

We had just had a big snow storm in the morning so it was about 19°F I knew that one of them would have their kids in a snow storm and sure enough I was right.

Because of the cold, we couldn’t just stay out there for long periods of time. So we moved Dolly into a kidding stall and watched her from inside the house on our camera. My parents and I would take turns checking up on her. A few times I would get dressed and go sit out there with her until it got too cold.

So at 12:24 my dad had checked on the camera and seen two globs sitting on the ground. So he hurried without telling anyone to go get them and bring them inside. They had to been out there for a while. Their hair was starting to freeze from the afterbirth fluids.

It is very important to be out there with a doe that is going into labor. When the babies are born you have to get the mucus out of their mouth and nose, or they could possibly die from the fluids. Well since we weren’t out there they still had fluids in their mouths and noses. So when my dad came back inside my mom and I woke up to dry them off and take care of everything.

So we brought the boys in and gave them some milk.. but here is when things got tricky. One buck didn’t have any sucking reflexes, so he wouldn’t take the bottle no matter how hard anyone tried. So then we brought out our tube feeding kit, now I hate tube feeding kids it’s very dangerous if you don’t know what your doing. So we got the one feeding off a tube, and here is when everything just went down hill.

The baby we were tube feeding starts taking from the bottle. So I put him down after his feeding to feed his brother. Well has I was in the middle of feeding the other kid, the one I had just fed starts choking, and spitting up milk, so I immediately put the other down and grabbed the one that was choking. As he was spitting up milk, some slime/afterbirth was coming up too. This baby had too much fluids on his lungs.

He was acting like if he couldn’t breath. We’ve tried everything to save the buck, but he sadly did die.

I just can’t get the image out of my head of him just laying there. His body ice cold. I feel guilty like it’s my fault why he died, I have should’ve been out there.

So this is the only buck left of Dolly. It’s sad that he lost his brother but he is doing good and healthy!

the reason why I’m posting this so late is that I’m just trying to focus on the living babies and the excitement of their futures.

Thanks for reading!

Ellie is up to kid in May!