Meet the goat cousins: the answer to "Why???"

Meet Leia and Obi - the inspiration behind the chaos which is now our life...tiny Nigerian Dwarf bottle babies who started it all. We met them at Emily's cousins' house (Aunt Karen's Animal Rescue) - if you haven't read the earliest posts on this blog this is a good time to go back and do that. (These were the "Bernies" we thought we were getting.) Really, there is almost nothing cuter than a week-old baby goat. It's sort of like what happens when all your friends start having babies and suddenly you decide you need one too, right away, and nobody tells you how you won't get a full night's sleep for years and you'll
have baby spit-up everywhere and all the things 
you'll have to buy and then of course the mountains of diapers...if you had all the facts and figures ahead of time no one would ever have children, but of course once you finally hold them in your arms you're madly in love with them and can't imagine not having done this - well, that's a little how it is with goats.
Recently we visited these babies again, the first time since these photos were taken, and they are now almost as big as our goat boys (who are a month
older) and causing so much chaos they make our
goaties seem almost angelic. We had to park at the
 end of the long driveway, as Obi and Leia leap to the top of any car that pulls in, then have great fun sliding down the windshield over and over. They sneak into the house regularly as well as visiting the neighbors. (Leia has learned to get herself a snack from the neighbor's outdoor table, once in the midst of a dinner party!). They run with the five dogs and four cats who also live there, eating from everyone else's bowls and have no clue that they are any
different from all the other pets. Their "free range" 
lifestyle affords them greater freedom than my fenced-in boys, but oh the consequences...After a day with the cousins we were glad to get home to our own babies, but I think I'll stick with the fencing.


(And here are Leia and Obi now - enjoying their favorite napping place on top of the SUV...just ignore the little hoof marks in the paint finish...)