Pregnancy and [Goat] Kids

For a little while now, Jeff and I have talked about taking a picture of me with the goats, since we're all pregnant right now.  It seemed like kind of a funny thing.  By now we're all far enough along that we look obviously pregnant, and some of the goats have started to moan more often, so on Saturday I suggested we finally take a picture. 

Jeff and I feel no confidence whatsoever in our ability to judge when the goats will kid, because last year Caroline seemed like she was ready to kid any day now for over a month.  She totally faked us out.  But, it seemed like there was a good chance that pretty soon not all of us would be pregnant anymore.  And if we were, we could always take another picture later. 

So, we decided to try to get a picture, and this is what we got:

Hm.  Not exactly what I had in mind.  But, they lost interest in our picture, and that was the best that we got.  So, we tried again the next day after church, and got this:

Not really much better.  Goats just are not very good at posing for pictures. They're all too close together, so you can't see that they have huge bellies.  And Tank (the buck) snuck into the back of our picture, even though it was supposed to be girls only.  We didn't notice.

Whatever.

So that was Sunday.

And then, very very early this morning (Wednesday) there were some noises outside and Chalcy started barking.  It wasn't cat noises, but I told Chalcy QUIET and sent her back to bed.  I fell back asleep too.  I woke up at about 2:45 this morning to the same noise, and it occurred to me what it was: BABY GOATS!

Once I figured it out, I was super excited.  I got dressed and hurried outside to see whose babies they were!  And how many!  And whether they were boys or girls!

When I got outside, Mercedes had a baby goat with her, and they were outside the barn, with all of the other goats. 

It was especially exciting, because just last weekend I told Jeff that I wanted a particular young goat from the dairy that we get our milk from.  She was a black goat with white stripes on the side and a brown belly.  Pretty!  But, she is a Drake doeling, which means that she probably costs $400 or $500 at the cheapest, and maybe $900-1000.  So, instead I realized that we have two black goats and our buck has stripes on his sides, and maybe we could end up with one that looked like that anyway.

So, I was really excited to discover that the baby goat near Mercedes looked very similar to the one that I had been interested in.  And?  Was it a girl??  (If Mercedes had a girl we were planning to keep it anyway.)  I checked.  Nope.  It was a buckling.  Too bad. 

Mercedes had been really big, so I was surprised that she only had one kid.  I decided to check the barn and found...

Another one! 

And in another corner, there was another baby goat!

Our best goat gave us triplets!  Awesome.  Hopefully not all boys?  I checked.  Both of the brown kids are girls!  Way to go, Mercedes!

Our buck this year ("Tank") comes from champion lines of dairy goats, and Mercedes comes from pretty good lines too, so it's great that she had triplets--and it's even more great that two are girls--because they will almost certainly be very, very good dairy goats.  It will be exciting to see how they turn out.

Breeding to improve our herd is so much more exciting than just breeding goats to continue getting milk!