(G)oat(G)irl

I was born in Des Moines, IA. Although Iowa is a predominately agricultural state, Des Moines is not. Later we moved to the suburbs and that is where I spent all of my formative years. I tell you this so that you may understand that I am NOT a country girl. Yet I find myself living on a goat farm. In the country.




The lovely lady with the beard and the blue collar is Gabby. She was my first bottle fed goat. She used to love me best, but then puberty hit and she switched allegiance to my husband. She luuuurrrrrrves him. She starts rubbing her head on him as soon as he crosses the fence and then nibbles on his jeans. The runt next to her is Tinkerbell, and she is my latest project. Between Gabby and Tink there was Patrick and Henry, and Lucy and Ethel. Unfortunately bottle fed goats don't usually survive and those 4 are no longer with us. Tinkerbell doesn't know it yet, but she is headed to the big goat pasture in the sky in a month or two.



Please disregard the Beverly Hillbillies goat shed there. It was still cold when they started dropping kids and my husband was still unemployed so he just nailed up scrap lumber to keep the wind off them. Last year I think we lost about 40 kids to the elements. That includes the ones that got suffocated at the bottom of the goat piles. They would bunch up trying to get warm and the ones on the bottom would be dead, every morning. We only lost one this year, and it wouldn't have survived any way. It helped that we bred them later in the fall, too. You can see Gabby being the Alpha Female at around 0:55.



They all came running over to the feeder when they saw me outside. I wish I could have caught the babies doing their little hyper jumping and hopping thing. It's adorable.

This certainly isn't the life I envisioned growing up, but it really is a (g)ood one.