Rain had her babies this week!
This is Rain, and her daughter, River, minutes after she was born. Rain is a first-time mom, and she had triplets - each one of them born head and front hooves first, like a goat ought to be born.
She delivered Roger first, and I held him up to her face, and she acted like, "What on earth is THAT?" It took a couple of tries before she started licking him. But, by the time she'd delivered River and Ocean (two daughters) she'd become obsessed. I don't think she understood what was going on with her body when she went into labor. She was scared, and of course, being in the kidding parlor is another strange and unnerving thing to a goat who's used to being outdoors. But, then, suddenly, there were babies! All three of Rain's babies got up on their feet and drinking milk really quickly. It was nice to have a non-traumatic birth after the last two!
This is Rain with all three of her babies in the kidding parlor shortly after they were born.
Here's an interesting thing I learned, watching Rain's babies learn to drink: a kid drinks from the same teat each time. So, with Rain's babies, Roger gets one side, and the two girls share the other side. Mothra's two girls both drink out of the same side, so when we bring Mothra to the milking stand each day, she's always full on the left side!
I learned a new expression this week: milk drunk. One of my jobs, every day, is to socialize all the babies. It's really important for the goats to be used to being handled by humans. The best way for them to get used to it is to be cuddled a lot when they're in their first weeks of life. I cuddle each one after the first feeding in the morning, and we also bring them in to the milking room when their mothers are getting milked and they get cuddled then. And then, any other random time in the day when I feel like a hug, I just go out and cuddle baby goats! I know - it's a hard life!
This week, when Jan and I went in to the far shed to see if there were babies in there, we found Mollie and Millie, their heads kind of waving around on their necks, their tummies just as round and tight as over-blown beach balls. Jan said, "Oh! They're milk drunk!" Those babies had drank themselves into a stupor! Here are three milk-drunk babies:
Luckily for the babies, their mothers are amazing milk producers. We are getting pounds and pounds of extra milk every day.
In fact, we've been getting so much milk that I've been freezing it in ice cube trays in order to make goat milk soap! I learned to make soap this week. I'm completely enthralled.
Soap making goes back to the Middle East, as far as anyone knows. There is evidence of Babylonian soap making around 2800 b.c.e. The Egyptians used soap about that same time, and the Romans famously made soap from urine. The Celts gave us the word soap, although their word was saipo.
Melting the oils, adding the milk and lye, getting to trace (which is the stage where the chemical reaction begins changing the soap from a liquid to a solid) doesn't take very long. An hour, at most. But, then the soap has to harden in the mold for 24 hours, and you've usually got to put it in the freezer after that, in order to pop the soap out of the mold. And then the soap has to sit on a shelf and cure for 30 days. During the curing process, extra moisture evaporates from the soap, leaving a harder bar, and the pH of the soap changes, becoming more gentle for your skin.
The entire soap making process took me back to my childhood. When I was in third grade, my best friend, Roger, and I read all of the Oz books. You know, it's not just The Wizard of Oz. L. Frank Baum wrote at least 14 other novels in the Oz series. The Patchwork Girl, Ozma of Oz, and a book about a bunch of potato people who lived underground. Roger and I read the books, and made magical potions out of liquids we found in his house. (My mother said that his mother was "very permissive"). We'd pour these potions on trees, in order to coax fairies out of them, or to break the enchantment that had turned them from giants into trees in the first place.
Making soap is a lot like that. Nearly every element is variable. You can use any number of different butters, different essential oils for aroma, different herbs for color. And that's just making organic soaps. Experimenting with the nearly limitless possibilities seems entirely magical to me and I am enchanted.
And, finally, this week we tattooed the oldest seven kids. This is required by the USDA. Also, by the Kinder Goat Breeders Association, in order to register goats. Jan had sent away for some green tattoo ink, and when it arrived, our friend (who trims our goats' hooves) came over to tattoo the kids' ears. By the end of the day, we had a whole bunch of green babies running around the farm! Here's Millie:
