First freshener (I hope)
With a little less than two months to go until Artemesia's hypothetical B-day...
Abigail [interrupting]: Is this going to be another one of those goat-butt-collage posts? Because, if so, I'm outa here.
Anna [hastily closing the goat-butt collage she was building in the Gimp]: No, of course not, Abigail. Go stand on your tire.
Ahem, anyway, before I was so rudely interrupted....
Artemesia has grown very
rotund lately, but I'm 99% sure that most or all of that mass is hay.
After all, on days when Abigail (using her herd-queen prerogative)
declares that all goats are going to stand out in the rain rather than
eating at their nice dry manger, our first freshener looks quite a bit
skinnier.
That
said, there are some small signs that give me hope our little doeling
has a bun in the oven. This past week, I've felt like her teats are
becoming subtly more noticeable --- they used to be tiny little things I
couldn't even imagine squeezing milk out of, and now they're a bit more
prominant. Possible sign #2: at hoof-trimming time, Artie's hooves
hadn't grown much at all despite all of the concentrates we're feeding
her (and the rather impressive amounts of hay she gorges on), suggesting
that she's putting those calories to good use elsewhere. And possible
sign #3: her chatty moods are even more frequent and are nowhere near on
a 21-day cycle, suggesting that pregnancy hormones (rather than heat
hormones) are at work.
That said, the goat-butt
photos are as yet inconclusive. So we'll keep waiting and hoping that
Artemesia will pop out a kid (or, more likely, a pair of twins) around
April 24. Fingers crossed....
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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