Today I logged on just to hit the publish button, and, of course... there was no record of the post. Sad. Maybe I'm not destined to post more than once a month... But nevertheless, here's a reconstructed version (which do usually end up going quicker and smoother than I expect them to). Oh, and note that all day in Leavenworth I was worried that Gigi would be worried about the not-so-explainable-to-goats loss of her babies for a day, but as it turned out she didn't seem to mind -- go figure.
Meanwhile, we have three more goat babies, as of last Saturday! Frosty was kind enough to wait for us to return home from the Apple Blossom Festival parade in the afternoon, which was nice because baby #1 was breech and needed a little tugging from Mike the goat-OB to get him out. Babies #2 and #3 were easy peasy, no intervention required. Two boys and one girl. And you owe thanks to Mike's dad Larry and his girlfriend Sandy who were visiting at the time for the extra hands and minds that got you very-very-newborn pictures of everyone.
So... we have Gaspar, Malki, and Zorro. Why the funny names, you ask? Two and a half years ago, when bro Yoni was playing bells in Spokane, Mike and I arrived christmas eve to join him on the doorstep of our now-Anglican-priest-friend, who was on track for a bit of a grumpy christmas. The resulting inadvertent cheering-up resulted in her calling us the three magi ever since. And so for our wedding, this friend wanted to give Mike & me three goats named after the three magi (Gaspar, Malchior, and Balthazar -- who knew), but realized we were getting overrun with goats and instead donated to Heifer International. The arrival of triplets, however, made us think this might be time to use the names, with a few adjustments made for Malchior (now Malki) being a girl, Balthazar (now Zorro) having cool face markings, and in general those magi-type-names being a little long and old-fashioned, even for goats.
Gaspar
Malki
Zorro, with a better picture of his face in the foreground below.
Gaspar is the smallest, and seems determined to make up for that. He was the second to be born, but the first to nurse. He developed the tendency, even right away, to stand a foot or two from Frosty yelling for her to come to him, rather than try going to her.
He wandered off around the barn their first night and got run over (but not hurt) by a spooked alpaca, causing us to move Frosty and all three kids into the kennel for the next two days. This turned out to be a good thing, because unlike with Gigi, three kids seemed to be too much for Frosty to keep in line and protect in the barn with everyone else, and so she spent all her time head-butting chickens rather than feeding the babies, and the babies spent all their time being overstimulated rather than napping. Once in the kennel, they slept for what seemed like 48 hours straight and Frosty got to chill out. The kennel is also where Gaspar developed a favorite habit of pushing his siblings around.
Lest you think that all we did with our out-of-town guests was birth goats, here are some pictures and a video from the Apple Blossom Festival parade.
And here are pictures from a little hike on the Horselake Trail foothills around Wenatchee, in good time for wildflower season.
Meanwhile, one little note for those of you more interested in human pregnancies than goat pregnancies (happily, we are now finished worrying about potentially-inopportunely-timed goat baby births for the year), the Lehrer-Cochran human crockpot project (as my brother cleverly calls it) still seems to be progressing well. But there has been something funny lately.
People always say that when you're pregnant, strangers and acquaintances alike are prone to both telling you horror stories about pregnancy and delivery, and of course also to touching your belly. I would have assumed too that people get overwhelmingly excited at you for you (we're excited too, but maybe in a bit more subdued way than I would have expected other people to be towards us).
But actually neither of these things has come up all that much. Instead, I feel like we've been overwhelmed with quasi-doomsday advice of what will happen once potential babyface is born. I mean, people love their kids and they don't seem to regret having had them, but we get long and detailed lectures on how exhausted and frustrated and overwhelmed we will be. And I don't know, I guess we've both been around enough friends' babies and kids for long enough to have that seem like a normal expected part of the territory, so getting that as the primary message over and over becomes a little oppressive.
Maybe we're more naive than I think, or maybe it's one of those "you just don't understand until you're there," things, but I'd like to think that neither has to be true. Everyone of course finishes their story with a "but it's all worth it," which somehow is under-satisfying for the end of the story they've just told. As in, all the hard parts are tangibles and described in detail, and the rewarding parts end up being an intangible afterthought. And certainly we haven't gotten this advice from everyone, but it has been way more widespread (and a little depressing) than I would have thought... makes me wonder what it is that makes the narrative come out that way. A rebellion against a previous generation feeling that you're only allowed to talk about the fun parts of parenting? A sense of surprise/betrayal among people who expected kids to be easier because of said previous generation's accounts? I'm not really sure...
In any case, on my lost post I had uploaded another picture of the orchard blossoms flowering (which have been later this year due to on and off rains and cooler temps), but that picture is saved on a different computer, so it's just going to have to wait until next time. No risking another loss here by waiting too long to post this. Hope you have a great weekend.
10 comments:
Hmmm...Is it possible that many of your friends are in the stage of parenting where they have multiple, toddler/preschool aged kids? Maybe you're just getting a preponderance of people at one of the hardest stages? Don't know. Hope we didn't inadvertently add to that total!
It's possible... a few are in that stage, but it really seemed to come from all across the board... But nope, GEB, we weren't hearing it from you guys at all (which, it really IS totally fine to hear and feel and say, i was just surprised at the prevalence, both of the sentiment and of the sharing of it with us)...
I am suprised you are getting the horror stories of parenting. That usually doesn't happen until they are teens. You will be so in love with your baby that you won't even notice the lost sleep that you have for a few weeks.
I've been thinking about this phenomenon. I think you hit on one of the reasons. Some of us expected love at first sight and rainbows and joy and when that wasn't the reality we (maybe just me) felt like there must be something wrong with us. So we want to protect future parents from feeling like failures when they are not loving parenthood every moment of every day.
The other reason I came up with is (warning, philosophical rambling coming) that trying to belong to a group is a big part of the human condition. And to belong, you have to have outsiders who don't and we like to delineate group boundaries. All parents are part of a giant club/clique. You are not a member quite yet. But you are about to become one, so this is the hazing ritual. This is not a terribly exclusive fraternity/sorority but we still have to feel like we posses some secret that the outsiders are not privy too. The joys of parenthood are all over movies/commercials and everything so that doesn't make for a good secret. But the dark side does....
Jonathan wants longer videos of the baby goats. He is totally in love with these babies :)
It's interesting, Lina, I wonder if things have changed in the last 5-10 years, or if it's just the people/outlets I happen to be exposed to, or if there's a difference between having kids at a "younger" vs "older" age... but I feel like the decision to have kids was really despite of what I'd seen/heard rather than anything else, i.e. way higher visibility of "dark" side than "rainbow" side.
And while you're right that there's something human about inside/outside divides, they always make me frustrated... Some of my friends have kids and some don't, and the quality and quantity of interaction I have with them just seems so much more easily correlated with personality match, style, geography, etc. than with whether or not they are parents (or whether they are partnered or single)... and so I always react strongly to feeling like I'm being projected onto these dichotomies, even if at times they can make sense...
Oh, and yes Zhao, we should take some more baby goat videos :)
wamnny,
So yeah, there are a lot of holes in my argument. The dark side is hardly a secret these days. Maybe there is a lot more stuff out there about the hard part of parenting than even a few years ago. I feel like some of it has to do with blogs and facebook and all that internet stuff where people feel freer to say how they really feel and then it becomes more socially acceptable so they can say it in person too. Maybe I forget, but I cannot remember having experience similar to yours when I was first pregnant. I was one of the first in our crew to do the baby thing, so close friends hadn't done it yet and I don't think random acquaintances said anything bad, except maybe about the lack of sleep. Now on facebook there is much complaining.
As far as the club/clique mentality, the last thing I want to inspire frustration. You have always been much better than just about everyone at transcending these sorts of real or theoretical boundaries. That doesn't mean they don't exist in principle. It seems to me that if someone says or implies the sentiment "you cannot understand until you get there" they are, likely unwittingly, drawing these lines between insiders and outsiders. Because the statement in itself is a truism, you cannot imagine exactly how anything in the future will be, whether its parenthood or tonight's dinner.
But at the end of the day, I hope none of this silliness is getting you down. Hopefully this is still exciting for you despite all the negative press.
Thanks for more thoughts, Lina.
True that walls/divides of all sorts exist, but I always feel like we can choose at each moment to reinforce them or not. The "you can't understand until you get there" sentiment just feels like a cop-out to me, even if it's a normal and human, in that it's easier to reinforce the wall than to stop and check whether its really there, or to decide someone else is in a different camp than to articulate what you're feeling.
Anyway, all overly philosophical, but clearly about way more than this situation. Blah blah. One other thing I find interesting, though, is that I hear more positive baby stories from parents whose kids are already grown up -- so... did they forget the harder parts, or did they have different expectations for childrearing, or was baby-raising just overlaid onto an overall less-hectic lifestyle than now?
Meanwhile, hope to get to see you one of these days! We're hoping to come east around Thanksgiving, but probably more towards NY/DC corridor than NY/Boston corridor...
Hmmm, as for sunnier older parents, I'd tend toward the amnesia theory. Most of us human tend to misremember the past pretty badly, in all kinds of whitewashing ways. And with parenting it really does seem that there's a strong, almost biologic trend toward forgetting. When A. was born I felt almost as if I'd never done the infant thing before. Then I started to get into that groove again but had no clear memory of what a toddler was like (what they did when, etc.)
But no doubt parenting expectations have changed over time, too, and that plays a role. Other generations may have gone easier on themselves and each other about not getting everything "right," for example. I think societal expectations about how parents should be shaping the world to foster children's utmost enrichment and guarantee their absolute safety, both, are pretty friggin' high. It can be a lot of pressure. In fact, I think many of the negatives of parenting may have as much to do with the sense of societal expectations as with the challenge of kids themselves.
thanks GEB... interesting on the amnesia plus societal expectations... i guess society has always been weird in different ways throughout time, and it all makes sense, but sometimes, it just seems, well,... odd :) :)
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