Whew, all I can say is, what a whirlwind! The entire 2 weeks of kidding was like a bad dream… except without the sleep. Cause why would anyone be getting sleep when running to the barn at all hours of the night? I felt like I was walking around in a perpetual fog day after day. But at last, we have come through it, not unscathed, but thankfully with a few nights of decent sleep behind us.

Ok, after that rather dramatic intro, here’s the real story…

The chaos began when I noticed Quinn going into labor 2 days before her due date. I checked her when I went to bed, and she seemed to be fine and not progressing too quickly, so I figured the next day would bring babies. I was right; the next morning we found 3 kids on the ground… 2 bucklings and 1 doeling. Sadly, all was not well. One buckling was near death and the doeling was gone. I’m not sure what happened to her, though I suspect Quinn kidded so rapidly that she couldn’t clean the babies off fast enough and the doe didn’t make it out of the sac on time. This was my fault… I should have been out there. 😦 Had I checked even an hour earlier, I may have been able to save her, but alas… So, I got the bucklings warmed and on their way to health and happiness.

That night around 11pm, I opened the barn to Lyric literally in the doorway, about to give birth. M ran to grab L to help me and we spent the next 3 hours drying babies and feeding colostrum and getting Lyric set up nice and comfy. She kidded quads in rapid succession. Had we not been there, no doubt some would not have survived, as there is no way she could have cleaned them all on her own fast enough, with the last 3 coming literally seconds apart. She had 3 doelings and a buckling. (2 of the doelings, and the buckling, I sold on the bottle a few days later) I saved the prettiest doeling for our keeper this year. Spoiler alert, she died a week later… but more on that later.

A couple days pass and one of Quinn’s bucklings went down. I medicated him as soon as possible but in a matter of hours, he was gone. See, at this point, though disappointed, I was only mildly unnerved. While I had only experienced the loss of one baby goat in the previous 4 years of kiddings, I could accept 1 accident and 1 death by illness as being reasonable. But little did I know….

Music went into labor the next day, and though I checked her hourly, she still managed to pop out triplets in between 6 and 7pm. This would have been delightful, had I not opened the barn to yet another dead buckling. He was still steaming warm, and I thought I had some chance of reviving him, but unfortunately, I could not. I’m actually not sure what happened… was it another instance where he wasn’t able to escape the sac in time, or was DOA? I’ll never know. Music had 2 doelings, and the buckling.

Trigger warning: This next one is graphic!!

With 2 kiddings left, I was now super uneasy, so when Eve went into labor, I checked on her all.night.long. I barely slept at all. In fact, eventually I just stayed out in the room by the barn for the rest of the night because there was no point going inside just long enough to take my coat off. I needn’t have worried. Eve was never going to kid without me. Like, never. 11am the next morning, she started pushing. I was really excited because I was supposed to go to my friend’s baby shower at 2pm. I was like yay, I’ll be done in time to go! But like, no. Because she never made progress. I finally ventured to check the position of the kid. I’ve pulled a few breach babies in my short time raising goats, yet had never felt such a presentation in my other experiences with malposition. I just kept saying “What IS this? This doesn’t feel right!” I finally found a leg and pulled it out… along with the contents of a baby goat’s innards. Horrified, I ran to find M and beg him to help me. He’s like, not the person to ask for help because he does absolutely zero with the goat births and knows nothing about pulling babies, but I was in desperate need of moral support, and he provided that. We took turns pulling and trying to reposition this wild mess of a kid, to no avail. The vet was out of town and I was at the point, I told M we should put the goat down for her own sake, when thank the Lord, we got in touch with another vet who agreed to help if I brought the goat to him. Because everyone who hasn’t slept in days wants to load up a goat with a dead leg hanging out of its backside and go chasing off to the vet… but since he wasn’t coming to me, I took her to him. Our options were grim… keep pulling (which wasn’t working) or a c section. No guarantee of her survival either way, one much more costly. For her sake, I opted for the c section. I was not pleased to find out that I would be assisting, as the vet had no assistant available. I’m not like, great with gore, and I’d already been almost to my elbow in guts and goo, but what else can you do, you know? Now, sad for me, goats can’t safely be put to sleep, neither should they be laying for a c section. (the vet said her guts would pop out, and I’d seen enough guts for one day!) I had to keep a fully coherent goat, weak from hours and hours of labor, upright and still for an almost hour long c section. Eve was over it. She wouldn’t/couldn’t stand, and I don’t blame her. I’m not a weak person, if I do say so, but my entire body was shaking under the pressure of holding her up for the duration. I thought I would give out many times, but I did not. I was sore for days. But back to Eve… She had a 10 inch uterine rupture, as it turns out, and the vet pulled out 2/3 of a baby goat. Literally, the back end and legs never formed. It was perfect otherwise, but the guts formed outside its body and it was just truly an oddity. I’ll spare you the picture. Once we got Eve put back together and home in her stall, off I rushed to take Music’s babies to their new home.

Trigger over, kinda.

I was pleased to think that I had over a week to recover (both sleep and literally recover from sickness as I came down with some nasty throat infection thing) before Legacy was due. But of course, I should have known better. The doeling I had chosen to keep decided to get sick, appear to be recovering, and then suddenly die, all within 6 hours time. Shaken with the viciousness of the disease and my inability to treat it in both this doeling and in Quinn’s buckling, I sent her for necropsy to find out what we were dealing with. A week later, after imagining all sorts of horrible things and panicking that it could be zoonotic, I got the results, though I’ll leave out the details because it’s boring. In short, all the remaining babies in our barn received 2 medications to protect them, and we hope they remain healthy. The babies we sold have been doing well, according to recent updates.

Legacy’s labor…. 2 weeks to the day after Quinn gave birth, Legacy went into labor. Checking on her frequently, and nervous, my friend offered to come by for moral support. I think we had worked ourselves into believing everything would go wrong. Heck, I’d decided the goaties were already dead, since I no longer felt movement. Anyway, Legacy dilly-dallied and pushed for longer than an hour, so wearily I went on a search and rescue mission for her stuck baby. It wasn’t even stuck, she was just being dramatic… *eyeroll* Out came a perfect doeling. After awhile she took to pushing again and we waited expectantly. Usually, the second kid comes fast. But no, this one really was stuck. Like, very stuck. I tried pulling, my friend tried pulling, Legacy thrashed and rolled and yelled, while occasionally grabbing a bite to eat, laying on her side. I’ve never seen anything like it … anyway… I once again went about getting ahold of the vet. He was headed our way when finally, my friend was able to get hold of what we had determined was surely another malformity. We really didn’t want to see it, but we really had to. Out it finally popped, a headless blob… WAIT, no it does have a head!! I was laughing and thanking God, my friend was laughing and we were both saying “I THOUGHT IT HAD NO HEAD!!!” over and over. She said to Legacy “Ok, that’s enough. We don’t need any more babies!” and Legacy IMMEDIATELY, delivered another perfect doeling. Praise God! Kidding season was finally over!!

In the following week, I got Quinn’s remaining buckling and Legacy’s buckling on the bottle and sold. I have Legacy’s 2 doelings which I plan to keep, at least for now. Eve is healing well and has really never acted any the worse for her horrific labor and birth experience. I thank God for that too! I’m still giving antibiotics, then once they are done, I intend to dry her off (dry her milk up) and sell her to a pet home where she will never be bred again. Which is actually kind of sad, for her, because she adopted Quinn’s buckling at one point and was doting over him and nursing him. She has strong maternal instincts.

So, I have been asking myself “Why am I doing this? It’s hard sometimes. It’s sad sometimes. It’s gross and gory…. Why?” Then I bring in the milk twice a day and I know why… because it’s in my blood. It feels right… not when it’s chaos and trouble… that doesn’t feel right at all. *sigh* But all the other times. All the happy times. When I’m laughing in the pasture, drying off the babies and thanking God for them being alive… when I’m driving a baby goat to its new home where it will grow up and produce milk or continue on the species… when I look a baby goat in its eyes and thank it for being anatomically correct and having both a head AND a butt… (sleep deprived, bare with me) and FOUR whole legs too!! That’s when I know why I keep doing this. I think M said it best – out there trying to help me pull Eve’s frankenbaby, he was like, “We need to sell all these goats”, for real though. Later that evening he looked out to the field and said “When we fence that area in….” I laughed and said “Yeah, you can’t quit now either, can you?!” 😉 And that’s just how it goes.

So by the numbers:

14 days

13.5 baby goats

9 were does

7 goats sold

5 were bucks

4.5 deceased

4 being milked, currently

2 babies retained

1 crazy kidding season