Cicada's anticlimactic kidding

In past years, a goat has given birth twice when I was speaking at the InHome homeschooling conference in the Chicago suburbs. So, I totally expected Cicada to follow suit, because the conference was on day 150 of her pregnancy. But just when I start to think I have all the answers, things go a little differently.

At 6:30 Saturday morning, I was still snuggly in bed and ignoring the bleating of the goats over the baby monitor, because they always talk to Katherine when she goes out there to milk and do chores. Then I heard Katherine scream over the baby monitor, "She's pushing!" I started to get up, then stopped and said to Mike, "She can handle it." I really wanted to sleep another hour before heading out to the conference.

There was more bleating, Cicada screaming, and Katherine screaming. Mike asked, "Did she say it's stuck?" I wasn't sure. The words were fuzzy, but Katherine's tone was definitely frustrated. I was not going to be getting another hour of sleep.

By the time I got outside, Katherine was drying off the kid, and Cicada looked happy. Katherine was wondering what took us so long. Apparently the kid was stuck. The front legs were coming out farther and farther, but the nose was not budging. When Katherine started to pull on the kid's legs to help, she pulled Cicada across the straw, but the kid still didn't budge. Within a minute or so, she did get the kid out. It was pretty big, and in any year prior to this year, I would have said huge, but 4.5 pounds isn't much compared to the 5+pounders that we'd had in the last month.

And that was it. A single buckling -- our only single kid all year -- and it came from a second freshener who had triplets last year. Apparently Sherri and Cicada didn't get any of the water (or whatever) that was causing all of the multiple births with the rest of the goats.

Hopefully this is the end of the 2011 kidding season. There is the possibility that Eleanor is pregnant, because she invited herself into her half-brother's pen a couple months ago. I've marked the calendar for May 25, so we'll see if she starts to develop an udder. But for now, I'm going to assume that we're done. I'll write up a recap within a day or two in case you lost track of everything.