“There’s a nose, and… a… hoof, there. I’m not feeling a second hoof though.”

When you arrive in the barn and hear that, it’s not the best sign. It means that the baby is going to be a lot harder to push out than it would be if it was presented normally. 

As I grabbed the camera and headed into the stall, Zephyr started licking Dad’s hand. For some reason the girls like to do that while they are in labor. But they don’t stop at licking someone’s hand – they’ll lick anything. Your head, hair, hand, crotch… they don’t care. Which really makes it awkward.  LOL

Eventually she got to work. (I’ve posted some of the pictures of the actual birth here.) After a couple of minutes of hard pushing, we had a leg and nose. Dad managed to get the baby out without the other leg in the normal position, which is really hard.

As soon as the baby was out we dried off the head, making sure it could breathe. As soon as we saw it was breathing, (basically when it starts jerking around) we checked to see whether it was a boy or a girl.

It was a girl! Everyone started throwing out baby girl “Na” names.

Because we have so many goats, we have assigned each of the does a letter. It has something to do with their name, and that is how we name their babies. Zephyr is Northerly Zephyr, so her babies were “N” babies. And because this baby was the first, the letter after N had to be A. The second baby would be a “Ne” baby.

While we were throwing out names, someone suggested Natasha and all the kids agreed.

“Why Natasha?” Dad looked a little confused. “Because that’s the Black Widow’s name in The Avengers.” Colter announced.

Everyone was watching Natasha, so I turned to congratulate Zephyr. “There’s a bubble!” I said, watching as it got bigger and bigger.

Dad felt around. “This looks like a normal presentation.”

Five minutes later, there were two legs and a nose, and then there was a baby! We caught it and moved it out of the way, clearing the gunk out of its nose. There was a second or two where I started worrying, because the baby wasn’t moving. But then it snorted and shook its head.

Greyden checked. “Um, I can’t tell. Mom, is that a boy or girl?” Mom leaned over the baby and looked. “It’s a boy.”

We decided on Nero. We brought Natasha and Nero into the warm milk room, waiting on Emery to milk Zephyr.

While they were in there, we continued to dry them off. They were both really cold, so we kept rubbing them and prayed that with the warm milk inside them they would warm up quickly.

Once we had fed them, we put them in a bin and left them in the milk room for an hour or so. I came back to check on them frequently, and when they were still shivering after an hour I decided to do something about it. The milk room might have been helping, but they were still cold.

I brought them into the kid stall with the other babies. Yes, it was colder out there. But there were also other babies in there that they could snuggle with. We had just fed the older babies, so they were all taking a nap. I put Natasha and Nero with Marcus and Valencia, hoping that they would accept them.

They did! When I came back to check on them an hour later, they had stopped shivering and were staggering around the stall like normal brand new babies. 🙂

By this time, we still had 16  does to kid, with only 9 days left in kidding season!

More in this series:

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