June Notes: Kidding Season, Garden Adjustments, and a Health Update

Note: This post can also be found on my Substack newsletter, Slower Than Intended.

This June was more like late spring than early summer. Clouds and rain and breezy sunshine. It made my time recuperating indoors a little more tolerable while Matt and the girls planted the garden, though I still would’ve much rather been out playing in the dirt.

Still, I had time to think through how to improve on last year’s chaos garden. First up: our tomato cages weren’t cutting it, so we picked up some cattle panels to support our nightshades. We also made several new raised beds, and connected them with arching panels that our winter squash will eventually climb. And lastly, we have a serious comfrey problem, so I’m trying to turn it into a solution. 

As far as problems go, comfrey is a good one to have. It’s deep-rooted and accumulates nitrogen, potassium, calcium, and phosphorus, which makes it ideal for fertilizing. But in our case it’s prolific to the point that it competes with even the weeds. So we’ve started turning it into comfrey tea, chopping and dropping around our roses and fruit trees, and using what’s left to help build up the quality of our compost. 

We’ve also made things easier on ourselves this year by transplanting starts rather than starting everything from seed. Honestly, this is probably how we’ll do things until we get around to building the greenhouse, which is still a summer or two away at best. But even with starts, the garden has been slow to take off. It’s only now that it’s getting warm that things are finally starting to wake up. 

Ichabod Crane

Pregnant Percy

As for kidding season, of the four does we bred (all to Ichabod Crane), only two took, which surprised us because the other two never seemed to go back into heat. But like the cool weather and my own health slowdown (more on that in a bit), it felt like this summer was telling us to scale back. And after two moves in five years, multiple renovations, and nonstop projects while raising littles, we aren’t arguing. 

Both mamas gave birth to twins, and three of the four kids were doelings, which makes us laugh, since that’s three times the luck we had last year when seven out of eight kids were bucklings.

Percy’s birth was rough. I always keep a close eye during labor, and I had a bad feeling about how long it was taking her to progress. When she did finally start pushing, nothing happened. After 30 minutes, she was exhausted. It was time to glove up and go in. Neither Matt nor I had ever assisted a birth to this degree, though I’d read and watched everything I could about it just in case. But knowing and doing are not the same thing. 

It took 20 minutes to get Percy fully dilated and the kid repositioned. He was close, with his head and hooves right there, but slightly under the canal. We helped shift him into place, slowly working him through while making sure his head didn’t fall behind. When it finally emerged, we could see he was still alive and in the sack, but he was huge. And Percy is a small goat, so it was no wonder she was struggling.

We held a gentle grip on his hooves and let her contractions do the rest. Once his head was clear, the rest of him followed fast behind. I brought him over to Percy’s head so she could clean him off.  He was silent at first. Too silent. Which is not what you want from newborns, so I was frantically clearing his face, watching his chest for movement. Finally, he sat up, shook his head, and let out the tiniest of bleats. 

Percy, tired as she was, went straight into mama mode. I’ve heard it said that rough births can sometimes cause mothers to reject their kids, but Percy’s a seasoned, attentive doe and wanted to care for him right away. Ten minutes later, she started pushing again, and this time it was a doeling, fully breech. She was a good bit smaller than her brother, but much louder. This is still the case nearly a week later.

Aspen’s birth, thankfully, was entirely uneventful. We half-expected her usual round of bucklings, but she delivered two giant, healthy doelings instead. 

As for the health issues I’ve been skirting around, turns out I should have had a blood transfusion after having my last baby six years ago. Between our house moves, the pandemic, and life unfolding as it did, I never got labs done. Certainly not ferritin.

Meanwhile, I started developing odd symptoms. The kind that creep in like a frog in boiling water: restless legs, histamine flares at night, brain fog, dizzy spells, and that familiar Coat Hanger Syndrome neck pain whenever I’d stand up for too long. It all came on so gradually that I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten.

In May, I finally went in for comprehensive labs, including ferritin this time. All my numbers pointed to severe, late-stage iron deficiency. I pulled up my old labs from post-op, and sure enough: hemoglobin at 7. I remembered, vaguely, a doctor mentioning how low it was while I was in the hospital, but I was half-asleep at the time and assumed they’d treat it. They didn’t. No one said anything after, and I was too focused on the baby and recovering from surgery to think to ask.

It is what it is. I’m angry, and I have regrets, and I’ll never again assume the system is taking care of me without double checking everything. But now I’m on the mend. I had my first iron IV last month and am slowly starting to feel better. It’s hard to remember what normal energy feels like, but I’m hopeful I’ll get there again soon.