Best laid plans...or "It was the bacon's fault."

After a long holiday weekend and three snow days, the girls were finally going back to school, albeit with a two-hour delay for icy roads. To celebrate, I decided to make french toast and bacon for breakfast.The goats were still asleep in their improvised pen in the garage (I peeked), so I planned to let them be until the girls left for school. It was a good idea - until the sizzling bacon set off the smoke alarm.  Noooo...

Desperate, I dragged a chair over to hit the elusive silence button on the ceiling alarm, but I knew the damage was done. Since the smoke alarms are all hard-wired together, when one goes off they all go off, including the one in the garage directly above my sleeping goats. So much for breakfast. I left the girls in charge of the kitchen and rushed downstairs, where, as expected, I heard a cacophony of frightened goat shrieks emanating from the garage, the sound of frantic hooves dashing back and forth in their tiny fenced area. Relieved at least that they had not pushed the fencing against my husband's car (two inches to spare!), I noted as I calmed them that the terror of this unexpected alarm clock had apparently caused a massive and widespread bowel and bladder release - could my morning get any worse? Oh, absolutely yes...

As I opened the latch to let them outside, Emerson somehow got his leg stuck in part of the fence gate. Instantly hysterical, he began lunging and bolting to free himself, resisting all my efforts to assist him. By the time I extracted his leg, Elliot was nowhere to be seen and Emerson hobbled away on three legs, blood dripping on the floor. Panic engulfed me. Was his leg broken?  How could I fix this - and how much time before the school bus came? I checked my watch - ten minutes. I yelled for the girls, and we went into overdrive. While Megan herded Elliot onto the deck and then threw together some packed lunches, Emily and I worked together to clean and dress Emerson's wound, then give him a tetanus vaccine injection, which was overdue but luckily purchased and waiting in the refrigerator. Poor Emerson, still in shock, never even saw the needle coming. Somehow the girls got on the bus, I cleaned out the garage and tended my injured guy, and by lunchtime he was putting weight on the leg and back to his scampy self.

All's well that ends well, but from now on I think we'll just have cereal for breakfast.