Babies

I had been wondering what I would write about...

...and then it became goat baby season.



If you recall, Gigi and especially Frosty had been looking rather large before Mike and I left for NY, but luckily we came home on a Sunday night to find the same number of goats as we had left. The next Monday, though, Mike had to go to Olympia for a three-day conference... and on Tuesday, I had a board meeting for Farmhouse Table (Mike's old work). I left work a little early to go home and feed everyone before the meeting, and noticed that Gigi was acting a little funny (hanging around in dark corners by herself, not eating, talking more than usual), but sometimes goats do that for a couple of days before they have babies. And besides she wasn't really due for another week or so. I considered skipping the meeting, but being the president makes that hard, especially when you don't really know whether or not babies are imminent at all. Plus I figured that even if it was a go, nothing too terrible was likely to happen in the three hours I would be gone.

But I came home to find Gigi and two kids all standing up in the back corner of the barn. Just like it's supposed to happen -- no assistance needed, no emergency c-sections, just all on her own and two healthy babies. So I stayed up for a while making sure they really were looking healthy and were able to eat, and that Gigi had something to drink, and that she wasn't sitting on them or abandoning them to be picked on by other goats or kicked by alpacas or pooped on by chickens. I tried to get them to all go into the kennel with me so no one would bother them, but Gigi wouldn't follow, even when I picked up the kids and took them over... she just kept going back to the corner of the barn where they had been born looking for them.

So I left them all as they were. And got up 5 hours later and they were still all fine, didn't need me at all. So I went swimming and then to a meeting at work, and came home for the rest of the day. And they were still all fine. Gigi already had the babies well-trained to stay near the barn and nap while she went out to eat hay. When she let them come outside with her, she didn't let them wander away. When other goats came too close, she chased them away. Somehow, motherhood had overnight made her super responsible and grownup. And so having them immediately integrated into the neighborhood seemed to work just fine. The alpacas were a little grumpy at times, accompanied by an occasional chase or kick, but nothing that seems to have done more than be scary. And while the other goats head-butt the babies away when they're annoying, they do it really gently.



There is a girl, the white-colored one, and a boy, the brown one with blue eyes. The girl looks like the huge white dragon/dog character from the movie Never Ending Story... so we named her Falkor. And by association, the boy became Atreyu, the warrior that sets out to save the endangered planet in the movie, and who Falkor helps along the way. The names are a little oddball, so I'm not totally sure they'll stick, but so far they seem to work. Meanwhile, the babies are a little shy... and very fast, and not so interested in being picked up. Very different than Bert and Ernie, bottle babies that they were (interestingly, Bert has continued to jump on people as often as possible while Ernie has really chilled out)... so anyway, we'll see how these two evolve (and how we go about scaling down our numbers of goats as the number of babies increase and the size of the pasture stays the same).






Shearing
If you have alpacas in Washington State, chances are that someone (or in our case, two someones) will give you the number of the roving alpaca shearer who lives up near the Canadian border but travels the state. He was going to be in Wenatchee this week, so we asked him up. Alpaca shearing is a little dicey, or at least our alpacas hated it. They did not like us cornering and catching them to put on halters that morning, or cornering and catching them again later that day to tie them down on a tarp. I had been around sheep shearing before, and the sheep I'm sure didn't love it, but didn't seem to mind or fight nearly as much.



Moppy growled and spit green smelly spit the entire time (into the face of the shearer's assistant once) until the shearer put a sock over her mouth to keep it contained. Loli, in typical Loli style, ran faster and was harder to catch than Moppy, but once she was cornered sat down and gave up. No growling or spitting, just some sad whimpering (which was sad...). Luckily (for us) they seem to have forgotten it by now, or at least aren't holding it against us.





We've given the wool to a coworker of Mike's who spins, and who will keep half and give the rest back for us to pass over to Mike's mom, who had asked to knit something for us with it. So before and after pictures below -- Loli and Moppy, alpacas-turned-weird-skinny-deer.






Passover and Colorado
Enough of all this goat and alpaca stuff, you say, how was the Passover trip? Good, I say. We spent some too-quick time in NY with seders and family



and stopped on the way back for a weekend in Colorado to visit old college friends, beautiful scenery,



and to go to a reunion of some of Mike's old friends.



The only trouble with going away during Passover is that when you get back, spring, i.e. the busy season, is already well on its way. You may recall last year's failed attempts to have the goats graze our lawn. So this year we bought some move-able electric fencing. And set it up. And got it to work. And leash-walked and/or carried some of the (non-pregnant and non-baby) goats into it. The shock of touching the fence seemed to hurt just enough to teach them to stay away from it. And all went well, well, until we tried getting them back into the pen. Ed, Cle, Bert, and Ernie were fine, but Dublin and Breezy have never liked being caught by us, and half the time aren't even lured in by grain, so the process involved a lot of chasing and running and attempted bribery and attempted lassos and eventually a half-dive-tackle to get them back in.

And what it all means is that we really need to come up with some sort of fenced-ish corridor to get the goats from the main pen to wherever we need the temporary fence to be... or a lot more leashes... or to never let Dublin and Breezy into the temporary fence area (which would be a bummer because they're good mowers). And so, for this spring, some of the grass might need lawn-mower-mowing while we're trying to get together a goat-mowing system that really works. But I think we're halfway there.



(We walked Gigi and Frosty around on leashes too so that they could have some grass without getting too far from babies or getting a in-utero-kid-shocks).





See Frosty's big belly? And speaking of big bellies, some of you have been asking about mine. Well, it's not as big as Frosty's yet, but definitely makes clothing choices more limited. I'm sure one of these days it will become more apparent on photos, but so far you can tell better in person. So you'll have to wait a bit. But things seem to be going well and uneventfully, and we are glad and grateful for that. The whole needing-different-clothes and getting-nauseous-bending-over-pulling-out-weeds and getting-tired-from-things-that-used-to-be-normal parts I could really do without, but I guess that's how it goes.

Stay tuned for continued adventures in goat babies, whenever Frosty decides that it's time.