It was a Saturday morning, and we were in full “goat preparation” mode. We had five baby goats going home that day, so we had to get them ready. We’d tattooed and de-horned them the day before, but I still had to get paperwork ready for three of them.
I was in the middle of printing out the paperwork for the first one when Mom came running out of the green screen room. “Belle’s kidding!” she said. Well, that was a good thing. Every once in a while there is a goat that we don’t have a due date on – Belle was that goat. So the fact that she was kidding before our last one meant we wouldn’t be waiting on her.
“How long do I have? Do I have time to finish Sandy’s paperwork?”
“I have no idea. You’d better come down to the barn.”
I sighed and pulled the SD card out of the computer. Sticking it in the camera, I grabbed my sweatshirts and headed out the door. It had gotten really warm! The weather was beautiful! A perfect day for babies to go to their new homes.
“So… is she actually doing anything?” I asked as I walked in the barn door. Sometimes these first fresheners took a while to actually get going.
“Yeah, she’s doing something. But you probably have time to go finish what you were doing.”
I ran back to the soaproom and finished the kid papers. The moment I was done I ran back to the barn with the goat notebook clutched to my chest.
Belle was panting, pawing at the ground. When goats are in labor they gather a big pile of hay/straw for their babies to be born into. Since it was Belle’s first time, she wasn’t doing as good a job as a second or third freshener might, but she was still getting a pretty good pile!
We had Red Bird and Ivy in the stall with us, and Red Bird kept coming over to annoy Belle. After a while we finally got her to go away.
Twenty minutes later, Belle actually got going. There’re a couple new pictures up on the birth pictures page, if any of you want to see those. 🙂
“This is the biggest baby we’ve had in a while! Look how big his head is!”
“His?”
It’s kinda funny, but it almost always works. Someone will say “Oh, look how big his hooves are!” or Dad will say “Let’s get you turned around, baby girl.” We don’t do it on purpose – if we did, we’d always say girl. But it’s what comes out, and it’s usually right. I don’t know how that works. LOL
Sure enough, it was a boy. Someone asked “what letter is Belle?” “She’s Y – she’s Yellow Belle.”
“Okay… so Yak?”
“Yabba Dabba Do?”
“Yaccident?”
“Yale?”
“Yarn?”
Red Bird came over and started sniffing the baby.
Red sniffing the baby
“Okay, we need to figure this out. I like Yale.”
“Yale works.”
“So his name’s Yale? Because I need to know to write out his collar.”
“Yep, it’s Yale.”
Yale taking his first steps
I headed into the milk room with Yale and got his collar written out. As I came out, a family came into the barn, ready to pick up their new baby goat. I could hear Mom talking to them. “Oh, you should have come twenty minutes ago – you just missed the birth!”
Donna says:
It must be so sad to let the babies go to new homes. How many are you keeping?