Last time we spoke about our growing menagerie in the Cute Baby Animal Overload post, John and I had just gotten four Nigerian Dwarf kids and four foster kittens. Let me tell you, we have gotten a big dose of parenthood since then! Somewhere in there we ended up with another litter of foster babies, so seven kittens total. We are currently down to four foster kittens in addition to our normal pride of Sylvie, Toulouse, and Luna. We were starting to feel like the animal version of the Duggars. So here are the parenthood lessons we have learned in our three weeks of being responsible for fifteen mouthes other than our own!
1. There will be poop in abundance.
Good gracious, who knew such little creatures could produce such an exorbitant amount of feces. One morning after someone (they will not be named) gave my baby goats toxic leaves, I experienced a literal poop explosion. The goats were covered from nose to tail. My guess is that they just walked around all night shooting s#!+ out of their butts like a bazooka without regard to who or what was behind them. No exaggeration. I was mortified. I did learn that I could handle the situation, one step at a time. It wasn't necessarily enjoyable, but few things are happy all of the time. They more than make up for it when there are moments like this!
2. Sleepless Nights are ROUGH.
Ezra, our male goat decided from the beginning that he did not want to drink out of a bottle. We thought that he was fine and getting enough nutrients from grazing, but this was not the case. Long story short, we ended up having to feed him through a tube, every four hours throughout the day and night. The three am feeding was my least favorite. John and I realized quickly that we really value our sleep! Ezra is doing well now and is gaining weight, but it was a rough week or so in there. We definitely have a newfound respect for our friends who are parents of newborns.
3. It's hard to say goodbye.
I know the whole goal of raising a baby is for them to grow up and be productive members of society. However, it is so tough when you pour so much time into bottle feeding, socializing, and loving them just to send them off into the big bad world! I do realize that there is a real difference between human and fur babies, one of which being the time it takes them to grow up, but we have given three of our foster kittens to forever homes recently and boy has it been tough. I seriously cannot imagine what my parents went through waving goodbye as they dropped me off at college.
John and I have realized that we still have awhile before we are ready to tackle the challenge of human parenthood. We are enjoying our multitude of furbabies and are sincerely hoping that fifteen fur babies at once will somewhat prepare us for the challenge when the day arrives.
