Such the quandary.

The kids all piled in the tub for their weekly “before church” bath. (No worries. There’s a Tuesday morning “before co-op” shower too. Most of the time.) With the amount of dirt in the tub when all the water was out, I know one of two things. Either this last half of the week was a really fun, muddy time, or we need to have a “Thursday night just-so-we-don’t-clog-the-drain-Saturday-night bath”.

Here a goat, there a goat.

Meet Ms. Goat. She’d been named Blackie. It doesn’t seem very fitting to me, so for now, she’s Goat. Maybe we should have a “Name That Goat” contest.

And her kid, Socks. I should have zoomed out – he really does have black “socks”.

Cute, pitiful, and feisty.

 

And currently taking up residence in a dog igloo.

Goat, on the other hand, is not quite cute or pitiful, but most definitely feisty. She’s gotten over kicking me for the most part. She’ll bite me the first chance she gets when I’m milking her though. Then she quickly goes back to what she was doing, knowing she shouldn’t have. She’s like a naughty child. If you pretend it did not happen, did it?

#6… heart beating, legs kicking, and stirring things up like a true child of mine

Ultrasound yesterday. My due date… is Charlotte’s first birthday. Won’t that be fun? Happy birthday, Baby Girl, here’s a new sibling for you. Ah, the irony of it all.

No twins. He thinks. There was something else there that he couldn’t decipher, but couldn’t see a heartbeat in it so assumed it was the placenta. So reassuring.

Time for a nap. You know what they say, sleep while the baby sleeps. And the other four… quietly play together in complete harmony. I’m certain. Please pass the ear plugs.

Meet Ms. Goat. Photo shoot to follow.

Saturday, I bought a goat. Two, actually. A milking doe and her kid, old enough to be weaned but not. Milked before, but not recently. Cheap. Turns out, spending more might have been ok. My knee would say so anyway. I left them alone Saturday (after driving through the top of Springfield in a pickup with two goats in the back. Good thing this isn’t New York.) and tried milking her Sunday night. Blaine held her head and it wasn’t too bad – but the kid had been with her, so there wasn’t much to be had. We put the kid in the chicken yard last night, gave him the dog igloo that came with the property, and bright and early I headed to the barn to milk the goat. It was a beautiful thing. She kicks, squirms, tries to get away, I spray milk pretty much everywhere but the bowl. My knee into her side provided a slight amount of persuasion for her to hold still – but only slight. For a few minutes, all was going better than I expected, and then the kid bleated, and all fell apart. Set the milk aside to tighten the goat’s two inch lead to, um, negative inches, turn to get my bowl, and the cat’s drinking the milk. Seriously?! Back to milking, almost done, 45 minutes later (pretty sure this is NOT supposed to take so long!) Ms. Goat decided to bite me. She got my barn coat. Ah, yes, this is going to be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Blaine saw my, ahem, dirty bowl of milk and suggested I feed it to the kid. Oh, no. I’m finding cheesecloth and straining it. I worked far too hard for those two cups of milk. We’ll be having some sort of cream soup for supper. The kid can have the other two cups that are in the dirt.

Mathematical confusions.

“Liberty, what unit of measure do we use to measure weight?”

“Ilbs.”

“Eden, if you cut something into two pieces, what is each piece called?”

“Twoths? No, tooths isn’t a word. Teeth?”

Oh boy, we’re learning now. Math provided a great deal of comic relief this morning!

Let’s mix things up, just a little. Ok, more than a little.

I’ve had two family practice doctors, two OB’s, and one certified nurse midwife (and then an OB when things didn’t go my way) for prenatal care. I’ve spent hours and hours in waiting rooms, waiting for my two minutes with my doctor. This time, it’s gonna be different.

This baby’s gonna be born at home. My home. With a midwife whom I already am beginning to love. And while I spent an hour and a half with the midwife last night, I didn’t wait for her for even a minute. She actually sat with me, in her little birth house, visiting on the bed, for an hour and a half. There wasn’t a white sheet or exam table in sight. Ah yes, it was beautiful. I haven’t been so excited about something in a really, really long time.

Such the memory.

Nine years ago today, I drove 66 miles from my job as a nanny on Long Island, got lost more than a few times, and went to a church in New Jersey for the second time. I’d been there once before, swore I wouldn’t do that and get so very lost again, and yet, two weeks later, unable to decline a sweet invite from my friend’s mother, I went again. And there, I met my friend’s brother. Oh, man. So very handsome in his three piece suit* and bright blond hair, I was done for. Seven months later, that friend became my sister-in-law, and the woman we can thank for her sweet offer of friendship and hospitality was my mother-in-law. What incredible nine years it’s been, dear Blaine. I love you.

*The three piece suit, it turns out, was the only clean thing available in the man’s closet. But I was smitten before I learned that laundry is not his thing. And now… it’s my job to clean his clothes. With pleasure.