THIS BLOG BY HAZEL's MOM... Who got to midwife Sarina.
This last kidding was really tough. Our best doe (Superior Genetics, 90EEEE permanent LA score and earned her milking star) is also our oldest doe, Sarina. Sarina has been shown twice in real ADGA shows, by us, and has earned 4 Reserve Grand Champions. We used our friend Marshall’s fabulous buck, instead of one of our 3 fabulous bucks, so that we could get some more genetics into our small herd, and if we had two doelings, we had committed one of them to Marshall, who shows nationally. Sarina had always always always kidding two for us and for both of her previous owners. Unfortunately, Sarina was much slimmer this year than she was last year, when she was carrying two bucklings or the previous year, when she carried two doelings. I was afraid she was going to do like Athena and have one big giant buckling. It has seemed to be our year for singletons, and for boys.
Sarina was due next Monday (the 7th), and she usually kids 1 or 2 days early, so we figured we’d have babies this weekend, which would be good for Hazel’s school schedule. If the kid gets 5 absences in any quarter, they get an automatic F in a class, and go on audit contract to earn a real grade. It’s a policy that I disagree with, but I understand since the schools are stupidly funded through attendance funding. However, it would wreak havoc with Hazel’s straight-A track record.
However, on this last Tuesday (4/1), Sarina started positioning and ‘dropped’ her babies. Most pregnant does carry their babies high, so that if you look at them from the rear, their barrels have a bit of an apple shape. When they have ‘dropped’, usually just a day or two before they kid, their shape goes from apple to pear – the weight goes down and they develop hollows in their upper backs, where they had previously carried babies. Also, Sarina developed a /huge/ udder. She normally develops a pretty big one, but this one was huge. Hazel was a wreck because she had to take a field test of the new PARCC exam, so she entrusted me with watching Sarina so that she could sleep. We have never had kidding issues with Sarina, so this seemed a safe bet. Haze was pretty sure we were looking at Wednesday-day kids, but I thought we were going to have kids Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning. I am rarely right when it comes to Hazel’s goats, and she is usually right, so she thought I could just check on Sarina every hour or so, unless something changed.
I waited until everyone was asleep in the house and snuck out with my sleeping gear at 11:30PM and sat down with Sarina in Hazel’s milking parlor, to keep her company. At about 1AM Sarina started stringing birthing slime, and getting up and down and having occasional contractions, but nothing major. At 2:15AM she laid down and I checked inside her with two fingers of a gloved hand, and I felt some hooves at the birth canal. Of course Sarina popped back up when I did the check and the baby slipped back into her. It was another 45 minutes, before Sarina laid down and really started pushing with some serious intent. I reached in and felt a baby bubble at the cervix, popped it and then to my horror, I felt a tail. A tail can be bad news – we usually want ‘nose and toes’ – two front legs and a head, or two rear feet, with hooves facing up. I had a tail, which meant there was a butt right there. This meant that I might have to reposition the baby.
Understand I’ve never put my hand inside a goat and was not particularly keen to, but I can’t tell how big a baby will be, when all I can feel is a tail. Even though Sarina was loose and her cervix dilated, I had no idea if this baby was going to get stuck or if Sarina could deliver it as a total breech. Sarina was performing a lot of the same behaviors that Athena and Robin did, this year, which was a lot of inconclusive positioning. In Athena’s case, there was a huge buckling kind of stuck and not moving forward. In Robin’s case, it was a big buckling in breech position, who needed to be repositioned. So I was thinking I had to reposition, and I did not want to mess up. I especially did not want to mess up with THIS goat, with THIS baby. So I reached in and started looking for a hock and hooves, and found the tiniest little hoof. One. While I was in there, I felt a great big (separate) head, too, so I was relieved that we had two kids, not just one. I got the one little hind leg pulled up, but it took a while to find the second leg, and Sarina was straining and I’m talking out loud to myself, “Follow the leg to the body and find the other leg at the attachment…There. Ok. Tuck in and let’s get pulled back…” Something like that. Fortunately, Sarina has a lot of body capacity, so I wasn’t fighting the other kid’s being squished up against this one. I got the other tiny hind leg and Sarina pushed and I tugged just a little and out came a very small gorgeous work of art of a doeling, who appeared to be dead. Most baby goats appear to be somewhat dead – hanging and loose and floppy - but this one appeared all the way dead. I remembered Hazel’s miracle with Hermes (Athena’s big buckling who she and Jill revived from pretty-dead, who is now acting totally completely normal), so I started trying to stimulate this doeling and clear her mouth and nose and hang her by her hind legs to try to get liquid out of her lungs, and there was absolutely no response. No tongue response, no legs, no twitch, no nothing. Sarina was licking the doeling, trying to dry her, and I tried to do mouth-to-mouth… Nothing. I may have, at this point, tried to start calling Hazel, but it seems like almost immediately Sarina started straining again. Hazel wasn’t answering, and that big head was coming out of Sarina … With no legs. I left off with the doeling go to help get this big boy out (I could almost tell from the shape of the head that he was a boy – he was just a big-boned fellow), and I caught a leg and shifted it forward, and out he came. He was a handsome fellow and very much alive, and so I started working on him to clear his nose and mouth, and wipe some slime from him, and then went back to trying to get the dead baby girl to quit being dead (and of course it was a girl, because we’ve had none and had actually planned on keeping quite a few of our own doelings this year). I really wanted to cry at this point. We wanted girls so much this year, and we were now at 6 live bucklings and 1 dead doeling. I finally called Jorge with slime-coated fingers and a slime-coated touch-screen phone and told him to get Hazel to come out try to revive a probably dead baby. Really it seemed like hours, but I’m sure this all took place inside of 5-10 minutes.
Then, oddly, Sarina started straining again. After the does have their babies, it’s usually about an hour or more before they pass their placenta. I was a little startled that Sarina was already passing her placenta, and that she was straining so much to get it out. Then I realized that the bubbly-thing coming out might actually be a third kid for the 8 year old doe who has only ever ever ever had twins. So I scotted over to take a look. I know what placentas look like (I am usually on Waiting-To-Pass-Placenta duty after kiddings, keeping the doe company), and what Sarina had birthed looked neither like a placenta, nor like a baby goat. It took me a second to realize that it was a baby, still in the baby-sack. It was like unwrapping a Christmas present! She was all dark-brown with a thick black dorsal stripe and nearly-black tips on her ears and a black stripe down her nose and a cresent moon of white on her poll, and she was vital and immediately kicking and squalling! By the time Hazel showed up, minutes later, I had Sylvia and Sylvester somewhat dried, but the little DOA doeling remained starkly still. Hazel tried her tricks, and then asked me a couple questions (eye reflex? Uh, I didn’t check, but no tongue reflex, nothing blocking her mouth or throat, no heartbeat that I could find, ribcase expanded when I breathed in her nose, so probably not full of fluid, but maybe.), and Hazel pronounced the first girl-kid dead.
It was a mix of somber and thrill – the two live kids Sylvia and Sylvester are ever-so-vital and the girl stood up inside of 15 minutes. Sarina was thrilled as well, though she kept looking for her dead baby. She can count, I guess, and she’d already seen and licked her firstborn. Sarina was fairly easy to redirect back to her living two, though, and she hummed and baby-talked and licked and nuzzled. Hazel named the dead girl Sondra, and I buried her yesterday morning out near where Hazel’s first goat, Annie, and her sweet wether Blaze, rest.
Wednesday was a rough day for Hazel, who was working on very few hours of fragmented sleep while the school tried to administer the fiasco of the state’s trial PARCC exam. Hazel couldn’t even tell anyone about the kidding (except her boyfriend Danny), because she couldn’t talk about the dead girl without getting emotional. When Hazel got home, she cuddled Sylvia for a long time, and we talked. Hazel confessed that Sylvia was almost exactly what she had ordered. She wanted another brown-eared doeling, to match our other Sarina daughter, Sarah. She wanted black points (and she wanted white specks on the feet, which we did not get). And the bonus is that Sylvia is almost the same color brown as Hazel’s Annie. Both Sylvester and Sylvia have their father’s gorgeous long ears with pronounced ‘flips’ at the end. Sylvester is a thick-boned, handsome fellow, and Sylvia is a delicate waif of a girl. Our scale weighed the boy at 6 pounds something, and the girl at 5 pounds something, but it seems to me that the boy was the same size as Robin's 7 and 8 pound babies. I think we need to calibrate the scale.
Our friend Marshall texted us about the DOA, that unfortunately these things happen, and it’s OK to be sad about it, but often there’s not a thing that anyone could have done about it. He is very happy Hazel got a Paramount/Sarina doeling, and he reassured me that yes, goats DO get hiccups (Sarina was making the weirdest noises and freaking me out!)…
We are sad, and we have both second-guessed and what-if’d our actions before and during Sarina’s kidding, but we are so thrilled to have two live babies out of Sarina, who is herself recovering beautifully.
Pictures below are of Sarina and her babies. The babies are 6 days old here.
This last kidding was really tough. Our best doe (Superior Genetics, 90EEEE permanent LA score and earned her milking star) is also our oldest doe, Sarina. Sarina has been shown twice in real ADGA shows, by us, and has earned 4 Reserve Grand Champions. We used our friend Marshall’s fabulous buck, instead of one of our 3 fabulous bucks, so that we could get some more genetics into our small herd, and if we had two doelings, we had committed one of them to Marshall, who shows nationally. Sarina had always always always kidding two for us and for both of her previous owners. Unfortunately, Sarina was much slimmer this year than she was last year, when she was carrying two bucklings or the previous year, when she carried two doelings. I was afraid she was going to do like Athena and have one big giant buckling. It has seemed to be our year for singletons, and for boys.
Sarina was due next Monday (the 7th), and she usually kids 1 or 2 days early, so we figured we’d have babies this weekend, which would be good for Hazel’s school schedule. If the kid gets 5 absences in any quarter, they get an automatic F in a class, and go on audit contract to earn a real grade. It’s a policy that I disagree with, but I understand since the schools are stupidly funded through attendance funding. However, it would wreak havoc with Hazel’s straight-A track record.
However, on this last Tuesday (4/1), Sarina started positioning and ‘dropped’ her babies. Most pregnant does carry their babies high, so that if you look at them from the rear, their barrels have a bit of an apple shape. When they have ‘dropped’, usually just a day or two before they kid, their shape goes from apple to pear – the weight goes down and they develop hollows in their upper backs, where they had previously carried babies. Also, Sarina developed a /huge/ udder. She normally develops a pretty big one, but this one was huge. Hazel was a wreck because she had to take a field test of the new PARCC exam, so she entrusted me with watching Sarina so that she could sleep. We have never had kidding issues with Sarina, so this seemed a safe bet. Haze was pretty sure we were looking at Wednesday-day kids, but I thought we were going to have kids Tuesday night or early Wednesday morning. I am rarely right when it comes to Hazel’s goats, and she is usually right, so she thought I could just check on Sarina every hour or so, unless something changed.
I waited until everyone was asleep in the house and snuck out with my sleeping gear at 11:30PM and sat down with Sarina in Hazel’s milking parlor, to keep her company. At about 1AM Sarina started stringing birthing slime, and getting up and down and having occasional contractions, but nothing major. At 2:15AM she laid down and I checked inside her with two fingers of a gloved hand, and I felt some hooves at the birth canal. Of course Sarina popped back up when I did the check and the baby slipped back into her. It was another 45 minutes, before Sarina laid down and really started pushing with some serious intent. I reached in and felt a baby bubble at the cervix, popped it and then to my horror, I felt a tail. A tail can be bad news – we usually want ‘nose and toes’ – two front legs and a head, or two rear feet, with hooves facing up. I had a tail, which meant there was a butt right there. This meant that I might have to reposition the baby.
Understand I’ve never put my hand inside a goat and was not particularly keen to, but I can’t tell how big a baby will be, when all I can feel is a tail. Even though Sarina was loose and her cervix dilated, I had no idea if this baby was going to get stuck or if Sarina could deliver it as a total breech. Sarina was performing a lot of the same behaviors that Athena and Robin did, this year, which was a lot of inconclusive positioning. In Athena’s case, there was a huge buckling kind of stuck and not moving forward. In Robin’s case, it was a big buckling in breech position, who needed to be repositioned. So I was thinking I had to reposition, and I did not want to mess up. I especially did not want to mess up with THIS goat, with THIS baby. So I reached in and started looking for a hock and hooves, and found the tiniest little hoof. One. While I was in there, I felt a great big (separate) head, too, so I was relieved that we had two kids, not just one. I got the one little hind leg pulled up, but it took a while to find the second leg, and Sarina was straining and I’m talking out loud to myself, “Follow the leg to the body and find the other leg at the attachment…There. Ok. Tuck in and let’s get pulled back…” Something like that. Fortunately, Sarina has a lot of body capacity, so I wasn’t fighting the other kid’s being squished up against this one. I got the other tiny hind leg and Sarina pushed and I tugged just a little and out came a very small gorgeous work of art of a doeling, who appeared to be dead. Most baby goats appear to be somewhat dead – hanging and loose and floppy - but this one appeared all the way dead. I remembered Hazel’s miracle with Hermes (Athena’s big buckling who she and Jill revived from pretty-dead, who is now acting totally completely normal), so I started trying to stimulate this doeling and clear her mouth and nose and hang her by her hind legs to try to get liquid out of her lungs, and there was absolutely no response. No tongue response, no legs, no twitch, no nothing. Sarina was licking the doeling, trying to dry her, and I tried to do mouth-to-mouth… Nothing. I may have, at this point, tried to start calling Hazel, but it seems like almost immediately Sarina started straining again. Hazel wasn’t answering, and that big head was coming out of Sarina … With no legs. I left off with the doeling go to help get this big boy out (I could almost tell from the shape of the head that he was a boy – he was just a big-boned fellow), and I caught a leg and shifted it forward, and out he came. He was a handsome fellow and very much alive, and so I started working on him to clear his nose and mouth, and wipe some slime from him, and then went back to trying to get the dead baby girl to quit being dead (and of course it was a girl, because we’ve had none and had actually planned on keeping quite a few of our own doelings this year). I really wanted to cry at this point. We wanted girls so much this year, and we were now at 6 live bucklings and 1 dead doeling. I finally called Jorge with slime-coated fingers and a slime-coated touch-screen phone and told him to get Hazel to come out try to revive a probably dead baby. Really it seemed like hours, but I’m sure this all took place inside of 5-10 minutes.
Then, oddly, Sarina started straining again. After the does have their babies, it’s usually about an hour or more before they pass their placenta. I was a little startled that Sarina was already passing her placenta, and that she was straining so much to get it out. Then I realized that the bubbly-thing coming out might actually be a third kid for the 8 year old doe who has only ever ever ever had twins. So I scotted over to take a look. I know what placentas look like (I am usually on Waiting-To-Pass-Placenta duty after kiddings, keeping the doe company), and what Sarina had birthed looked neither like a placenta, nor like a baby goat. It took me a second to realize that it was a baby, still in the baby-sack. It was like unwrapping a Christmas present! She was all dark-brown with a thick black dorsal stripe and nearly-black tips on her ears and a black stripe down her nose and a cresent moon of white on her poll, and she was vital and immediately kicking and squalling! By the time Hazel showed up, minutes later, I had Sylvia and Sylvester somewhat dried, but the little DOA doeling remained starkly still. Hazel tried her tricks, and then asked me a couple questions (eye reflex? Uh, I didn’t check, but no tongue reflex, nothing blocking her mouth or throat, no heartbeat that I could find, ribcase expanded when I breathed in her nose, so probably not full of fluid, but maybe.), and Hazel pronounced the first girl-kid dead.
It was a mix of somber and thrill – the two live kids Sylvia and Sylvester are ever-so-vital and the girl stood up inside of 15 minutes. Sarina was thrilled as well, though she kept looking for her dead baby. She can count, I guess, and she’d already seen and licked her firstborn. Sarina was fairly easy to redirect back to her living two, though, and she hummed and baby-talked and licked and nuzzled. Hazel named the dead girl Sondra, and I buried her yesterday morning out near where Hazel’s first goat, Annie, and her sweet wether Blaze, rest.
Wednesday was a rough day for Hazel, who was working on very few hours of fragmented sleep while the school tried to administer the fiasco of the state’s trial PARCC exam. Hazel couldn’t even tell anyone about the kidding (except her boyfriend Danny), because she couldn’t talk about the dead girl without getting emotional. When Hazel got home, she cuddled Sylvia for a long time, and we talked. Hazel confessed that Sylvia was almost exactly what she had ordered. She wanted another brown-eared doeling, to match our other Sarina daughter, Sarah. She wanted black points (and she wanted white specks on the feet, which we did not get). And the bonus is that Sylvia is almost the same color brown as Hazel’s Annie. Both Sylvester and Sylvia have their father’s gorgeous long ears with pronounced ‘flips’ at the end. Sylvester is a thick-boned, handsome fellow, and Sylvia is a delicate waif of a girl. Our scale weighed the boy at 6 pounds something, and the girl at 5 pounds something, but it seems to me that the boy was the same size as Robin's 7 and 8 pound babies. I think we need to calibrate the scale.
Our friend Marshall texted us about the DOA, that unfortunately these things happen, and it’s OK to be sad about it, but often there’s not a thing that anyone could have done about it. He is very happy Hazel got a Paramount/Sarina doeling, and he reassured me that yes, goats DO get hiccups (Sarina was making the weirdest noises and freaking me out!)…
We are sad, and we have both second-guessed and what-if’d our actions before and during Sarina’s kidding, but we are so thrilled to have two live babies out of Sarina, who is herself recovering beautifully.
Pictures below are of Sarina and her babies. The babies are 6 days old here.