Two More

There are two more of them now. LaMancha bottle baby monsters. Jessie's kids.

They don't have names either, Z is a very hard year, and they all look exactly alike except Pinky and that other one, Joemma, who is part Toggenburg even though she has no ears. The rest of them run around in a black blur, some are black and tan, some are black and cream, some are black and brown. They are all boring.

"Aren't they cute?" says the farmer, carrying them around.

Not really, I think. But what can you say.

To be polite, I try to pretend I am charmed by their puckish antics. Goodness! They're adorable! With their earless heads and their little monkey faces! Look at them knocking all the buckets over and dancing across the clean hay with their muddy footprints! What could be cuter!

Who has time to list all the cuter things than an earless-monkey-looking baby goat? Let's just start with a Nigerian Dwarf baby goat, maybe? By like 10,000 percent or so?

That brings us back to Hannah Belle Lecter, my daughter, who has been steadily achieving a more and more blimp-like condition. Each week Lori says, "she must be getting close," but since every year Hannah Belle is bred approximately 17 times (she enjoys breeding, what can I say, it's a free country) we never know exactly when she might kid.

But even I would say, as I see her lumbering across the pasture blotting out the sun with her bulk (not today, today it's raining), even I would say, "she must be getting close."

Mustn't she?