Hardy Highlights : The Year of the Goats-Parts 2 & 3

I never did quite finish telling about all the goat drama from this year. I believe I left off at Calypso giving birth to Breanna. We did sell Breanna to a girl and her boyfriend who were just starting out with goats. They ended up getting a bunch from the Riedel's too. But then they broke up and so we bought Breanna back from them after all. It worked out because we decided to sell Casper since he kept breaking in to the girl's pen. So we sold him and bought Breanna. Then we sold Luna and Andromeda because we thought they were pregnant. It turned out they weren't so the people who bought them didn't want them anymore. So now we've got them back too. Drama!
So, picking up where I left off, the next goat to freshen was Andromeda, on April 4, 2010. She magically went into labor on the weekend also, so Daren was home and was able to take care of her. The funny thing was that the Cannon's had taken our kids for the night so we could go on a date and have some alone time. Before we left to go out to dinner, Daren went to feed the goats. He came back in and said, Andromeda's in labor. So instead of going out to dinner, we sat with her until she had her baby. She had a beautiful black baby girl and Mackenzie named her Brieta. She was a horrible mother and wasn't interested in her baby one bit. She cried for Daren as soon as he left her alone in the garage. We ended up bottle feeding her baby. Luckily, a sweet family wanted to adopt and bottle feed Brieta. I was so relieved to find a good home for her and one that wanted to take over the bottle feeding duties.

Mackenzie holding Brieta with Andromeda in the background.

Kelsey was so thrilled to be holding Brieta

This is the picture we put on craigslist.

The real drama began when Luna went into labor (April 15). For starters, it was on a school day and Daren had some important meetings that he couldn't miss. To make things worse, it wasn't going well. Something was wrong. I called Daren and he came home for lunch. But it still didn't happen and he had to leave again. Finally, I went and got our neighbor, Shirley Benson. She came over and reached in to see what was happening. The first baby was backwards. Luna was ready to deliver but the babies just weren't in the right position. So I held Luna while Shirley started pulling them out. She ended up pulling out a total of 4. Then she checked to make sure there weren't any others and headed home. The problem was that Luna still wasn't getting up and feeding the babies several hours later. Finally, the next morning I called Shirley and told her how Luna was behaving. She was going to come over and show us how to give her shots of penicillin anyway. She came over and checked her again. It turned out there was a 5th baby. We were so surprised because Shirley had checked to make sure there weren't anymore before she left. But because there were so many we think it was just tucked somewhere impossible to find. Unfortunately, this little baby was dead because it hadn't been delivered soon enough. The other 4 were all light tan/white little boys. This was a little girl, black with white spots.
I was about 6 months pregnant when all this was going down and I was a little bit emotional about it. I thought Luna was going to die. Shirley thought so too because she couldn't get the last little girl out. Thankfully Bob and Stephanie Riedel came over and they were able to get it out and save Luna's life. At this point, it was time to put an end to goat breeding in our family. Breeding goats is a job for someone who has no other job. Daren, however, does have another job. He could always breed them in the summer, but then we wouldn't be able to go on trips to Colorado. So he agreed that it was the end of goat breeding too. It was fun while it lasted (you know, once we found out our goat was going to survive). We bottle fed Luna's boys too because there were so many of them. They were very sweet and fun, and we were grateful to find good homes for them also.

Luna and her boys.

Grace holding one of the boys- They were born right before school got out and the Cannons showed up for piano lessons. We didn't end up having lessons that day.