Two years before we moved to Oak Hill, we brought home two weanling Nubian does. I'd been talking about getting "a goat" for a long time. Now that we had our own home on one acre in the Michigan countryside I'd started a flock of chickens, and when I saw the ad on the bulletin board at our local feed mill, my goat adventure began.
Drawn by our youngest daughter
Nubians were the obvious choice for me, I just fell in love with those long pendulous ears. The seller told me that goats do better when they're not alone (and she's right), so I bought TWO weanling kids.
Bringing them home was an adventure/fiasco in itself, but that's another story for another day. We'll just say that at the end of it all, we had Hope, a flashy black and white spotted weanling doe, and her half-sister Dream, a brown doe with two small white spots on her back.
They weren't very friendly, but a week of graham cracker treats and lots of time spent with them in the little goat pen worked wonders. Hope's personality was as flashy as her spots, while Dream was quieter and hung in the background.
About a year later we bought Chloe, a registered Alpine doe in milk, and eventually we moved to Oak Hill. We borrowed and then bought a grade Nubian buck from our new neighbor, and thus began our goat herd.
One of my favorite memories is of a sunny Oklahoma spring afternoon, when our daughter and I sat with our backs against the round bale of hay, watching "the girls" grazing and their kids frolicking in the new goat pen. We loved just sitting and spending time in their company.
The Beginning of Our Story
This post has been shared at some of my favorite Blog Hops
