It was February 3rd and my family was feeling a little lost. We were expecting babies starting the end of January, and it had been a week or two of waiting, and waiting, and waiting.

Friday afternoon, I was getting ready to eat lunch when the long-awaited call finally came. “Babies in 20 minutes,” Mom called through the house.

I ran to the locker room and pulled on my muck boots and coveralls. I grabbed the camera from the schoolroom, where it’d been waiting, and ran out to the barn.

Emery, Greyden, and our barn guy Andrew were waiting with Angel when I made it out to the barn.

About two minutes after I made it out there, Mom arrived, and she was doing a Facebook Live stream! So, if you’re interested, there’s a live stream of this birth on our Facebook page.

A few minutes later, we had a baby! For some reason, the umbilical cord didn’t break, so Andrew ran to the tool room to get some scissors. After cutting the cord, we were able to put the baby down, and found out that it was a boy.

We threw some names around for him, but because Angel starts with a vowel, we can’t follow our usual naming system. So babies whose names start with a vowel are in alphabetical order, which means we need to know if there are any more before we can name them.

When another baby was born, we were excited to have a girl. We “bumped” Angel, which means wrapping our arms around her stomach and giving her a hug, trying to feel for any more babies, and didn’t feel anything, so we were able to throw some names around for the kids. After a few minutes, we decided on Alexander and Angelica. (We’re huge Hamilton fans, and were excited to get to name our first babies of the season after our new favorite musical!)

We brought the babies into the milk room and dried them off, put their collars on them,

trimmed their umbilical cords and sprayed them with iodine,

took some selfies with the first babies of the year,

took some regular pictures,

and got them their bottles.

We left them in a bucket in the milk room overnight, since it was still cold and there were only two of them.

The next day, we brought them out to their pen in the baby barn. Aren’t they adorable?

We’re so excited to have the first babies of the year on the ground! Follow us on social media for live updates, using #GMSKids on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter!

2017 #GMSKids Status:
1 Buckling, 1 Doeling.
1 Doe delivered, 83 remaining.