Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Waiting for goat babies

These are pictures of Xoe's birth last spring, 2008. Today is her due date and we are expecting kids anytime. For the last four nights Dustin and I have been taking shifts going up to the Doe's stall and checking to see if Xoe is in labor or if there are kids on the ground. Xoe is huge. We've been so certain that we've been seeing signs of imminent labor, but we've been fooled into our sleepless nights. Well, once again I am sure that she is in early labor stages. We looked at last year's birth dates an did some math. Last year Xoe had her kids on her 150th day at 5pm. A friend of mine and local goat expert informed me that his goats tend to have the same length of gestation from year to year, kidding within hours of when they kidded previously. First timers may be exempt from this, but we are going to see if this rule applies to us.
In the picture above and below I am drying of Xoe's firstborn, Yin. Xoe is like "ouch that hurt, what is going on?"These kids were born right as I was in last minute dinner preparations for Noah's second birthday dinner. Our family was just arriving as we finished gettting the kids to nurse once.
Here is a photo of Xoe's kids at a few days old. The doeling on the right is Yin; our first Wild Roots doeling. On the left is her brother (we called him Yang), we sold him along with one of our other whethers as a pet/ brush clearer. We were pretty fortunate to be able to sell all four of our first whethers as pets.
Other news: I stuck eleven eggs under Honey on Sunday night. So we will be checking twenty-one days, or a day early, for baby chicks. Our feed store is getting sexlinks in a day after ours are due to hatch so I might be able to graft them on to Honey. Today, I ordered a half a pig from Delta Meats. We've been wanting to order a half a pig since last fall, just waiting until we had the money to do so. If I'd planned ahead I could have specified the cuts I wanted. This one was already processed it and it's been a while since I've done any research. We will be getting sausage, bone in ham, bacon, short ribs, spare ribs, roast, pork chops and so forth. They deliver it into town tomorrow. Time to go check for goat babies!

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