Tracy Bookman Photography

Yes, you read that right. We have 6 new kids here.

Of course, they’re real kids - meaning, goats, not children. You see, aside from being a wedding and portrait photographer in the Colorado Springs area, we also have our own micro-farm. It’s just enough to provide for our own family.

Any way, we had 5 female goats (does), and 4 of them were/are pregnant. Last Wednesday morning, around 5:00, I went out to check on the goats. Behind the barn was a new little kid with its mom. Behind them was another kid and mother goat. So, I dashed back into the house to prepare two 1-gallon buckets of molasses water (molasses water provides minerals, nutrients, and energy that the mom needs after birthing).

When I returned to the barnyard, there was one kid nursing on each doe.

One doe, named Jubilee, is a light brown with a white belly (this will become important soon… keep reading). The other doe, named Achsah (pronounced Ak-sah) is dark brown with black markings. Any way, Jubilee had one and Achsah had one, and both kids were hungrily nursing.

The next day, I noticed that Achsah’s kid was showing signs of weakness. Through talking to some other goat people, we determined that she was not giving enough milk and that the kid was becoming malnourished. So I rushed off to the feed store to get all the things to deal with the situation: electrolytes for the kid, a nursing nipple and bottle, as well as some medicated balm to try to stimulate the milk production in the mom. We tried a couple times to bottle feed the kid with no success, and I couldn’t seem to get much milk out when trying to milk Achsah. Weird. Also, both sides of her udder were the same size. That’s unusual because a kid will normally have a favorite side and so we have to milk out the other side to keep production up. But, hers were balanced and not very full.

So we worried about all of this for a day, then on Friday of last week, I came up with this crazy theory. Jubilee’s kid was dark brown with black markings while Achsah’s kid was light brown with a white belly. Achsah was also still VERY wide. Combining these details with the fact that she wasn’t milking out very much led me to conclude that both babies were actually Jubilee’s and she had rejected one, and that Achsah had adopted it and was trying to nurse it, which wasn’t working well due to the fact that she hadn’t birthed yet herself. But, then we thought about that and decided that was too crazy to be true.

The next day, however, Achsah gave birth to her own set of twins! So my crazy theory had been correct. Hence, the little white-bellied goat we named Annie, after Little Orphan Annie. Now Achsah has her twins and an adopted kid to care for, Jubilee just has her one, which we named Abby (for no particular reason), and one of our other goats, Joy, has her own set of little twins. We still have one more due to deliver. I’m guessing that it will be today, and that it will also be twins.

I’ll let you know!

Thanks for reading.

-Tracy
The Colorado Springs Photographer

I don’t know why I keep doing it… trying to climb Pikes Peak. Perhaps it’s because I am a Colorado Springs native, and I had never climbed the Peak and come back down all in one day. There was the time when I was 15 and my friends Dave and Jeff and I climbed it, but we camped overnight, went to the summit the next day and came back down.
Then, about 10 or 11 years ago, I tried it again with some different friends, but one got a very bad case of altitude sickness and we had to get him on the train and get him back down as fast as possible.

Then, 2 years ago, my oldest son, Kramer wanted to try it. After only about 4 or 5 miles, he pulled a muscle, and we had to turn around at Barr Camp (about 6.5 miles from the trailhead).

So, last year, Kramer and I tried it again. He pulled the same muscle, thought not nearly as badly. So we kept going. This trip was in September, and right before tree-line, it began to snow. Then it turned to a blizzard. Like a dummy, my warm weather clothing consisted of only a heavy cotton sweater which soaked up every snowflake. Suffice to say that with the hypothermia which was beginning to set it, that if not for the Lord’s help and the recognition that if I quit moving, things may have gotten quite ugly.

Yesterday, we made sure we had adequate clothing in case of cold weather (it snowed and temperatures were in the upper 30’s). But, about 1.5 miles from the top, a bolt of lightning came out of nowhere with no warning, and landed somewhere in the vicinity of where I was on the face of the Peak. Have you ever seen a 45 year-old man scurry like a chipmunk under a rock? That was me.

Well, we made it to the top, rested for an hour in the gift shop, then nearly ran back down the trail to get to timberline again. All the while another thunderstorm brewed at the top of the mountain. I felt like a skier trying to outrun an avalanche!

My other boys may have to find someone else to take them up this homicidal mountain!

Thanks for reading,
-Tracy
The Colorado Springs Photographer