Our baby season has officially ended! This year’s season seemed to be longer and busier than last year. Bottle feeding our babies, delivering piglets, and trying to be ready for market, we have had our hands full this year. Our last goat delivered on July 6th with a healthy set of twin girls. Edna, Eric’s Hereford sow, that didn’t get bred in time for fair pigs, had her first litter of eight on June 4th. It is nice to have some breathing room for a couple of months and reflect on how smoothly things went. This year we had a total of 18 kidds born at the farm and they are doing well. None of the mothers had any major problems, and the babies are growing like bad weeds. Delilah our very first Hereford sow delivered a litter of four on March 1st with her daughter Edna delivering eight June 4th. We had moved Edna into a stall a week before her due date. We do not use farrowing crates for our sows, we just put them into a clean stall and let them deliver. Eric says “We will be one less sow before we use those awful contraptions.” But Edna had different plans for her delivery. She was a bit upset to be off of the pasture, so much so we were afraid she was going to rip the stall apart, so we put her back out. Two days before she delivered she started leaving the group and building a pig nest for lack of a better term. Sure enough she delivered eight healthy piglets out in the field. Our Hereford hogs are truly pasture pigs. As for the last goat to deliver we had a rough idea of when she was bred but we were not one hundred percent certain. Being that she was a twin and the last twin to deliver we started calling her twin two. As it turns out “twin two” is quite possibly the most talented goat in the world of showing signs of delivering without being close to delivering. For the last six weeks of her pregnancy we kept thinking “maybe the buck did his job the first time.” Finally after weeks of false alarms, while we were milking the other goats, she delivered twin girls. If we have learned nothing else from this season it is the simple fact that things happen when they happen. Worrying and trying to second guess your decisions doesn’t help. It is best just to play the cards you are dealt, when you are dealt them and enjoy the ride. After all “Happiness is the journey, not the destination.” - Alfred D. Souza. As we make this journey we are once again looking forward to another litter of pigs from Delilah around the first week of September and again starting our goats kidding the next spring.