Meet Ms. Goat. Photo shoot to follow.

Saturday, I bought a goat. Two, actually. A milking doe and her kid, old enough to be weaned but not. Milked before, but not recently. Cheap. Turns out, spending more might have been ok. My knee would say so anyway. I left them alone Saturday (after driving through the top of Springfield in a pickup with two goats in the back. Good thing this isn’t New York.) and tried milking her Sunday night. Blaine held her head and it wasn’t too bad – but the kid had been with her, so there wasn’t much to be had. We put the kid in the chicken yard last night, gave him the dog igloo that came with the property, and bright and early I headed to the barn to milk the goat. It was a beautiful thing. She kicks, squirms, tries to get away, I spray milk pretty much everywhere but the bowl. My knee into her side provided a slight amount of persuasion for her to hold still – but only slight. For a few minutes, all was going better than I expected, and then the kid bleated, and all fell apart. Set the milk aside to tighten the goat’s two inch lead to, um, negative inches, turn to get my bowl, and the cat’s drinking the milk. Seriously?! Back to milking, almost done, 45 minutes later (pretty sure this is NOT supposed to take so long!) Ms. Goat decided to bite me. She got my barn coat. Ah, yes, this is going to be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Blaine saw my, ahem, dirty bowl of milk and suggested I feed it to the kid. Oh, no. I’m finding cheesecloth and straining it. I worked far too hard for those two cups of milk. We’ll be having some sort of cream soup for supper. The kid can have the other two cups that are in the dirt.