Hi friends! Welcome to this newsletter! I am using these stories from my little urban farm to help us all remember that life is magical. My goal is to turn into a real life “goat writer” - although that’s a job I basically just made up.
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On to the baby goats:
It's baby-goat-palooza at our house right now. It's impossible to take a step anywhere when they're out of their pens without some little bouncing stinker underfoot. It's basically like a constant baby-goat-comedy-hour until they do what all babies do, eat, and then pass out.
Baby goat life is THE life. Although they're all less than a week old, they're already forming their little goofy personalities and are all so different from one another. Tomorrow will be their first bad day, as they're all about to be disbudded, a process by which our veterinarian will come and remove the horn "buds" or the base of their would-be horns. It's a quick process, but babies do NOT like it.
Goat people differ on horns v. not, and it's a controversial goat topic on which people have VERY STRONG OPINIONS. Posting on social media about disbudding v. not disbudding will elicit the same kind of responses you get from posting about masks on two-year-olds, vaccines, or if Donald Trump will run for President again or not. Everyone thinks whatever they believe about the practice is not only correct but that everyone who disagrees with them is a complete idiot.
I disbud for a few reasons. Goats without horns are easier to sell. We have a woven wire fence because we back up to bird refuge that is really mostly a coyote refuge, so ours is an easy fence to catch a horn. I have seen what happens when one goat stabs another, even accidentally, and it's no joke. Imagine one of those horrific pictures when a dumb tourist gets stabbed at the "Running of the Bulls" in Spain - that's what it looks like.
But, I'm not a super-religious "mine is the only correct way" owner in the disbudding debate. There are good arguments on both sides, and like most things in life where both teams are sure they're right - neither side holds a monopoly on what's fully correct.
Anyway, so, I'll have the disbudding procedures done tomorrow on the kids, and they'll get their shots. Then I'll give them about another week before we decide who is staying and who is heading on to the next farm. It's always a tough call, but we can't keep them all.
At the end of the first round of kidding, we had three mamas who gave us eight kids total. Bella was first with twin boys, next came Late with two-boy and two-girl QUADS - both ended up being drama births. Then, Monday, Mini Moo Moo gave us a boy and girl twin combo that was notable only in that it was not particularly notable at all. Moo woke up, yelled a little, laid down, yelled some more, and BOOM, babies.
Moo's uneventful birth reminded me that goat births are usually easy and totally fine. Especially on the heels of the two others that were less than easy, it felt like a footnote - but it shouldn't - because it was perfect.
After Moo gave birth, nothing made me think, "I need to write a Substack about this!" the same way that I felt with the other two. It was routine, so there was no "story" to tell.
That's a problem. Moo's birth was just like the overwhelming majority of births that happen here. But, because there was no "story" there is nothing really to write. Goats are bred, they kid, they're milked, I make cheese. It's a cycle that happens every year.
It's the stories we tell, the mundane we don't - in some ways, that's a good thing. It's how we relate. It's also how we prepare for the unexpected, for those occurrences on the tails of the bell curve.
It reminds me of when I was pregnant. When I started to get large and visibly "with child," women, some of whom I didn't know, felt the need to come up and tell me crazy and sometimes upsetting birth stories. WHY? Is this a thing that people do? I wrote an entire post about it at the time because it seemed like such a weird societal ritual.
I realize, though, it's a product of selection bias - the stories we tell.
We like to write, read, and convey things outside the norm. We love danger, the unexpected, even the unlikely. If I wrote every boring birth on the farm, there would be more one-sentence posts than you'd want to consume: "XYZ gave birth, it was fine. She's fine. The babies are fine. Yay."
There is such beauty in the norm. The one-sentence stories might just feel like bulk, but they're also the single sentences on which I build a life. Moo threw twins, and they're both cute and great. The end. In three weeks, I'll start pulling them away from her at night and milking her in the morning and have cheese and lattes that will remind me why I do all this work.
For me, though, this is a reminder that the mundane stories are as, if not more important to tell. Life is mostly lived in the boring, between the margins, and firmly within the norm. The non-stories are stories, too.
If I only focus on the punctuation, I will miss the beauty in the everyday. Even the norm is exceptional. So, Moo's story is nothing and everything - it was normal, and it was special.
I promised premium members special access to exclusive baby goat photos! So if you’re a premium member, (or if you want to BE one) here are photos I just took for you today:
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