A pen a six-week-old kid cannot escape from
Weaned kids are small, springy and professionally curious, so prepare the pen before you collect them and test it at kid height. Woven wire or stock fencing with gaps a kid's head or body cannot slip through beats rails or wide-mesh panels, because a kid who gets his head through a fence will keep pushing. Check gates for kid-sized gaps at the hinges and latch, and plan a secure night pen against dogs and other predators — kids are at their most vulnerable in their first weeks away from the dam. Collect them into the finished pen, not a temporary corner you intend to upgrade later; first impressions set habits.
Shelter, bedding and the feeding corner
Kids need a dry, draught-free shelter they can pile into together, bedded with straw over a floor that drains, and small enough that their shared body heat works on cold nights. Set the feeding corner away from the sleeping corner: a hay rack or net at kid height, a shallow feed pan for any starter feed, and a bucket of clean water they can reach without climbing — hung buckets tip, so stand the bucket inside a tyre or a frame. Free-choice loose goat mineral belongs in its own dry tub under cover from day one, since growing kids need the copper and minerals a grazing-only diet may not supply.
The kit that actually gets used in week one
Beyond the pen itself, gather the unglamorous supplies before the trip: enough of the exact feed the breeder has been giving them, so their diet changes gradually over the first week rather than overnight; good hay; a basic first-aid kit with a thermometer, wound spray and electrolytes for a scouring kid; hoof trimmers in a small size; and collars or a marker for telling near-identical kids apart at feeding time. Line up a vet who sees goats before you need one urgently, and save the breeder's number somewhere you will find it at midnight. Weigh or condition-score each kid on arrival day too, so you have a baseline before the move affects their growth. A notebook in the feed room earns its keep faster than any gadget.
Collect their history along with the kids
A weaned kid arrives with a past you did not see, and the breeder holds most of it. Ask for birth dates, the dam and sire if known, what worming and vaccination the kids have had and when, anything they were treated for, and what they have been eating and how much. Write it down at collection, not from memory in the car. Those details shape your first month — when the next worming falls due, whether a vaccination course is mid-series, how fast to transition the feed — and they are far easier to capture while you are standing in the breeder's yard than to reconstruct later.
That history travels properly in KinsLe: Transferrable Profiles moves each kid's profile from the breeder to you with records, routines and milestones intact, so nothing about their start gets lost in the handover.