Whey Cool Ranch

06/02/2026

An Ode to Baby V - Would you like to see AuDHD in action?

I went to bed at 2am, got up at about 5. I fed V, drank my coffee, got dressed, put my shoes on, put my hair up, and I just was too exhausted to move.

So I went to lay down for a nap. V is a goat. A Nubian goat. Goats get scared when they are alone, and Nubians get loud when they are concerned about something. I was NOT going to sleep - at least not alone.

So I grabbed her, tucked her into my arm, snuggled the blanket around her, and we passed out.

At 10am I woke up, but she ...did not. Would not. Utterly avoided, refused, and ignored the idea altogether. So I grabbed my camera and got 5 minutes of the cutest thing I have seen in a very long time. And then I realized that I used to hold my daughter that same way, and play those same wakeup games, and I broke.

So I had to process it, and I am very AI friendly, so I wrote a down my feelings in a way that felt right, googled "best AI music generator for folk rock", found one, and here we are like 6 revisions later. The song is catchy, but didn't tell the story of me falling in love with V in a way that felt right. So I made a video.

I'm an idiot sometimes, but at least I have fun being an idiot. And now I have to pay the stupid tax and spend the next 5 or 6 hours in the barn. Because when that urge hits, your sense of time does not jive with reality, and hyper focus hijacks your brain...Well, I thought surely it would only take an hour or so.

Did I mention that I'm an idiot? 🤣

06/01/2026

A long one but I think most of you are not the "30 seconds max" crowd, bit of a ramble with my morning coffee, a view of doe herd as they walk by with Zara, their LGD, and lots of Baby V having her first touching grass experience in her life 😍

06/01/2026

Let's start the week with the best news 😁 Baby V did this all by herself!

05/31/2026

This just makes me so happy. Goat, doing goat things 😍 Baby Valkyrie has made so much progress today.

05/31/2026

You say there's goat on my sofa watching nature documentaries? No way 🤣🤣🤣

I am so not into house livestock, but given my own health issues, this is better for both of us. It definitely smells like I need to empty the diaper pail, and I haven't washed so many towels since kidding 10 does in a week, but we are both comfortable and safe and she's getting all the lovins

05/31/2026

Woohoo 🙌🎉🎉🎉🙌 we are sternal-ish 😜😍

05/31/2026

05/31/2026

Here's our baby Valkyrie this morning, feeling sassy. God I hope she recovers. She's my hero right now - how can I possibly give up in the face of this awesome little girl's will to live? She definitely deserved her own name letter, she's not going to stand in anyone's shadow

05/31/2026

Sometimes farm life sucks really, really bad.

First, so you don't panic: Valkyrie is still here. Still weak, still recumbent, her body refusing to cooperate. But she knows me now — and she absolutely knew the bottle. We might pull the feeding tube soon, because she did her level best to suck it dry. More chew than suck, but the want was there, fierce as ever. Opinionated as hell in a body that won't yet answer the call. That's my girl.

Her half sister didn't make it. See that beautiful black doeling behind Val's loudly colored brother? Dead this morning. Perfectly fine last night — bouncy, beautiful, parkouring off anything that would hold still. No symptoms. Just gone. She was stunning, and I was so in love with her.

One fighting with everything she's got to stay. One gone without a sound. Mother nature handed them the same odds — she just doesn't tell you ahead of time who she'll let you keep.

Spring gets romanticized so hard. But the bountiful blooming life isn't limited to the pretty things. The same warmth and rain that bring the world roaring back bring death right along with it — barberpole worms exploding in the herd, listeria thriving in the humidity, botulism growing in the damp pockets of last year's hay. Every one of those is life too. Nature isn't rooting for my goats over the worms. She gives everybody a chance.

So I watch. Some go glossy and round and content. Others go pale and thin right alongside them — same ground, same feed. I'm forever thumbing back eyelids, running my hands down spines and over briskets, counting ribs I shouldn't be able to feel, listening for the cough that's more than hay dust.

There's no word for the dread of walking out to the barn at first light, bracing for what you'll find before you've even opened the gate. There's also no word for that feeling of relief when you do your head count, your eyes run over everyone looking for signs of trouble, and all is well.

That pressure doesn't let up when spring does. Summer just trades the worms for drought-stressed grass and the poisonous things that start looking good once everything else goes dry and crispy.

If you're new to farm life and reeling because you did everything right and still buried something you loved — you didn't fail. This is the part nobody puts on the reels. The animals you bury are not a verdict on you. They're the cost of admission to caring for living things in a living world.

Because here's what we forget when we romanticize all this. In Jurassic Park, Dr. Malcolm said life finds a way. He wasn't wrong — and we're fools if we think our hands are on the wheel. The healthy kids are life finding a way. So is the worm. So is the listeria, the clostridia, the bacteria that found their way into a beautiful girl who was fine twelve hours ago. All of it is just life, finding a way. The same force I'm grateful for is the one that breaks my heart on a Sunday morning.

Mother nature isn't your friend but she isn't your enemy. She's simply bigger than you, older than you, and entirely uninterested in your plans. You don't win by bending her to your will — that's folly, and she'll teach you so the hard way. You win by paying attention, reading what she's already doing, preparing for what's coming, and pivoting to handle every surprise.

Adapt and overcome. The Marines have it right. Out here it isn't a motto — resilience is the single most important skill a farmer has.

This is why I cuss like a sailor. And my brain's only word for this is FUUUUUUUUUUUU........ ok, back at it. Now I take a body and a feed sample to the vet, and we keep looking for answers to a problem we have yet to identify. And cancelling my show plans for next weekend because I'm not the type of person that would risk your herd for a ribbon

05/30/2026

For those following baby Valkyrie's story, here's the full picture.
Where we started: Valkyrie is one of our preemies, a twin, born small but otherwise healthy and active.

She first went down about nine days ago with what looked like classic PEM/goat polio — the kind of thing that overlaps so heavily with listeriosis that you treat for both and don't wait around to find out which.

We started thiamine and supportive care. She'd rally after treatment, then slide back. Up and down, day after day. Still eating, drinking, and bright-eyed enough to try to run from the syringe, so we kept fighting.

Where we are now: Two days ago she crashed hard — appetite gone, weak, then recumbent and seizing. We got her to the vet. IV line, feeding tube, the works. Here's the part that keeps this from being a simple story: her standard bloodwork is all normal, no fever, not dehydrated.

What we're treating is presumed encephalitis — inflammation/infection in the brain — and we're hitting it with two antibiotics, mannitol for swelling on the brain, and round-the-clock fluids, thiamine, and tube feeding. We haven't needed anti-seizure meds since 11pm last night, which is something. She's flat-out and floppy, but she's lucid and opinionated — mentally present and clearly still in there. In a brain case, that's the single best thing she could be showing us.

Our working theory has shifted over the course of this. We wondered about failure of passive transfer — not enough protective antibodies from colostrum — but she got a solid 16oz over her first 24 hours by bottle, so that's less likely than we first thought. The likeliest story now is an infection that found its way in (a navel-origin bug is on our minds, given she was born unattended in the group pen) and eventually reached the brain.

What happens next: We're giving the antibiotics another 24-36 hours to show us whether they're working. That window is everything — we're watching for her to get up onto her chest, for her swallow and suck to come back, for purposeful movement.

Progress means we keep going. No progress, or backsliding, and we'll be having the hard conversation about quality of life, because surviving isn't the goal — surviving as a goat who can live a good life is.
Plasma transfusion is still on the table as our next move. We'll be using our own does as donors — same herd, same pathogen exposure, antibodies tuned to exactly what she's fighting — and our vet will do the professional work of collecting and administering it. We're going in clear-eyed: at this stage it's a supportive boost, not a magic bullet. But she's still fighting, so we're still fighting.

We know how this might end. We're letting her show us how much she's got, and we'll honor whatever she tells us — with gratitude for everything she's teaching us along the way. Because what we learn here will save the next one.

Keep fighting, warrior princess. 🤍