Star Wars look alike...

Most every kidding season presents us with at least one bottle baby. For the last couple of years we have been selling them immediately on Craig's List. It was just easier that way. Mixing three bottles a day and trudging down to the goat pens to feed tends to mess up the day.

But this year I am doing just that--for a little guy I call Jar-Jar Binks. He had a rough start. His mom was a first timer, pretty small at just a year old, and Jar-Jar was and is a "hoss" of kid. He was stuck in the birth canal for who knows how long when we found the poor nanny straining and pushing with all her might. Feet and nose were all we saw, and it took all of Keith's strength to pull him into the world.

The first thing we noticed was how swollen his face was, and his tongue was so enlarged it would not fit in his mouth. Although we tried every trick in the book, Jar-Jar could

not nurse or swallow. He was amazingly strong, and his instinct pushed him to nuzzle and hunt for lunch, but the nanny soon gave up worrying about him, and he gave up trying. So I milked mom to

gather the all-important colostrum, and then we tube fed him. Tubing is a tricky process which involves running a small tube down the throat directly into the stomach, and then pouring the milk into a syringe attached to the tube. Goat raisers learn how to do this for weak or cold kids, to get them on their feet so they have the strength to nurse. But Jar-Jar was not weak, and he was handful to hold and feed.

When we first tubed the little monster, we thought it would only take a day or so for the swelling to go down enough for him to feed himself. Wrong. We tubed him for four straight days. Every time I worried we might miss the stomach and pour the milk into his lungs, which would kill him within minutes. We were lucky. Jar-Jar was lucky. And the nanny had forgotten she had baby.

On day four his face sported a more regular shape, and he finally

mastered a small amount of suction. Still he couldn't curl his tongue around the baby-bottle nipple and basically lost more milk than he ingested. Necessity is the mother of invention, and I quickly learned that if I held the bottle with one hand and kept the fingers of my other hand curled around his muzzle to prevent his tongue from slipping out the side of his mouth, the milk went in him instead of on him. I now had a special needs goat kid on my hands.

But Jar-Jar has always been energetic with a strong will to live, and is extremely comical in his rush to claim me as his mom--and he kind of grew on me. So I am mixing bottles, lots of bottles because he is growing by leaps and bounds, and I'm hoping his natural instinct for grazing will soon kick in. But he has to learn to manage that tongue--this time on his own.