a post over at brandon’s puppy reminded me of a funny story that i probably never ranted, although i’m sure a few of you have heard it.  it has to do with my time as a goat–mommy.  in february of 2005, i had my first experience with midwifing.  my brother-in-law had several goats that he had to induce labor on and those kids had to be bottle-raised because of some disease that could have been passed on through the milk. 

i batted my big blue eyes at hubby and, next thing you know, i had two precious little kids to take home to ga. i don’t know if you’ve ever had a goatlet, but they are just the cutest and most playful little things!  they are also a little noisy when they feel insecure.  their bleating sounds just like a crying infant.  a loud crying infant.  they required several feeds a day at first so i worked from home a couple days and then we were able to ween them down a bit and we just went home for lunch to feed them during the day.    while we were home, we’d let them run around the backyard or garage but while we were at work, they stayed in a playpen in the tiled useless area off of our kitchen.  hubby was very concerned that someone was going to see us with them in the backyard or complain about the bleating and call the county because we were certainly not zoned for farm animals.  he worried over this quite a bit. 

about two weeks after bringing them home, we came home to find a card stuck in the front door.  it was a DCF card with the message “please call immediately” written on the back.  hubby freaked!  he was sure that someone had been walking by the house, heard the sound of babies crying, knocked on the door, looked through the window to see a playpen with sheetrock laying over it, and called to turn us in for being terrible parents.  i called the number on the card for two days leaving messages and trying to figure out how to explain that our babies were goatlets and they were very well cared for so, please, don’t take my kids away!  finally, i did get to speak with the woman who had left the card.  it turns out that it was a mistake on their part.  they were actually looking for people in the next neighborhood over with the same house number and their street name was our subdivision name*.  the whole thing was just a big misunderstanding but, oh, what a coincidence that it just happened to be the same time that we had loud crying goatlets in the house.  i thought it was frikking hilarious!  really, i couldn’t stop laughing – not even parents and already on the DCF radar! 

the kids never understood.  they didn’t care though because a few days later they had a vacation to orlando where they were treated like gods by all the neighborhood kids at my sissy’s.  i’m telling you, those were some spoiled, well travelled kids.  the looks that we got when we put them on leashes to feed them and walk them at gas stations were priceless.  do you think goatlets would like living at the beach?

* this wasn’t the last mixup we had with these apparent-child-abusers.  there were several deliverymen that i argued with about them having the wrong house.  i would even explain exaclty where the mixup was but they would come back two or three days in a row trying to make the same delivery.  one time we just accepted the delivery, got the a.c.a’s phone number off the packing slip, and had them come pick it up from us.