Sherri's twins

With the 2011 kidding season progressing so oddly, one could say that I started to get a bit paranoid. Before Katherine left for school on Wednesday, she told me that Sherri's tail ligaments were gone, so I figured she would be going into labor soon. When I hadn't heard anything by 10:30, I decided to head out to the barn and check on her. Well, it was obvious she was in labor, although she was not making a sound.

Although Sherri is eight years old, I have never actually seen her in labor. If it were almost any other goat, I would not have been worried, but from my perspective, Sherri's labors have always been measured in negative numbers. How is that possible? Well, normally I'm in the house and hear a scream over the monitor. I go running to the barn to find Sherri licking her first kid and pushing out the second one. But nothing went normally this year, and maybe if I weren't so worried, I would have been happy to stay in the house until I heard Sherri scream. But, no, I had to go out there to check on her. And I saw her pushing -- quietly -- for an hour.

I tried to remain calm and convince myself that if something were wrong, she would not be quiet. I flipped through a seed catalog while sitting in the straw and watching her. Then I heard that familiar scream. When I looked at her back end, there was a hoof and a nose. "So, this is how you do it, eh, Sherri?" A few more pushes, and the kid was born. It was a huge buck kid -- and I really mean huge.

A few minutes later, and another kid was born. Then Sherri stood up, acting like she was done. But she couldn't be done, could she? She has always had three or four kids every year, ever since she was a yearling. In this crazy year of multiple births, could she really only have two kids?

Yes, apparently she could. After I weighed them, I realized that the two of them weighed as much as three or four normal kids. One was 4.7 pounds, and the other was 5.5 pounds!

This was the second time I've bred her to Draco, and it is the second time she had all bucks. Three people had reserved does out of her, so I had some emails to write.