8th Goat

Evidently sometime yesterday, in the midst of seven children playing together, and three adults talking about this and that and keeping an eye on what the kids were up to and cooking and cleaning (cause there just is no cooking or eating without simultaneous cleaning and I suppose overscheduled people eating out or eating processed junk ALL the time is evidence enough of that principle at work), our younger female goat had her baby. At any rate, this beautiful warm afternoon as husband worked replacing ribs on the big hothouse and kids played and I groomed the horse, I noticed that there were only six goats in the field with us and that Cinnamon was not there. Which just about can only mean one thing.

Now, since all the goats, male and female, run together, we never know exactly when to expect the babies. We have a good idea by watching the natural swelling of the abdomen and then the swelling of the udders but this being Cinnamon’s first pregnancy she didn’t swell her udder so much. And since she evidently only had one baby, she wasn’t huge. Certainly not like her mother last spring when she had four babies at once. Now she was HUGE.

So girl children and I went looking through the woods to find her. Daughter #1 saw her first. She’s so wild and wily that even with corn I couldn’t get close to her. That is not totally a bad thing although I’d really like to know if we have a boy or a girl baby. It is cute and dark brown, whatever it is. And strong and running and nursing so all is totally well. I wouldn’t be planning on milking her this lactation anyway – I always like them to go through the first cycle totally naturally, let the udder develop and be regularly nursed and not asked to stretch unnaturally to accommodate milking. But I do need to work on taming her to a bucket of corn a bit. If it is a boy baby I’ll need to weather it (basically, put a tight rubber band around its balls so they fall off) and before I do that I’ll need to give it a tetanus shot but all that is weeks away from needing done.

I hope I can get a photo to post but then I’ve been trying to get one of the kitten Dilly for a while now and haven’t managed that either!

We had such a wonderful visit with our friends yesterday. The kids seemed to have a great time and I know I did. It is not so easy for people to come here and visit us. They usually can’t drive all the way up to the house and so have to park in the front and walk a quarter-plus mile uphill. Then leaving is to walk down and this time of year it is usually dark. I appreciate the effort it takes.

And I finally got to feed my home-made ice cream to Laura! I love to feed people. Especially people who have some appreciation of what they are getting to eat here.