Wow. I have been tired like crazy from these new meds. If you know me, then you know I’m often tired. This is just way out there. But I have kept you waiting long enough now. I do believe formal introductions are in order.

Mathilde’s three wonderful kids.

Starting with Nougat:

Then her sister Vanilje (which means vanilla, as you might have guessed):

And finally the boy, 3B (I shall explain that name soon):

Aren’t they lovely? I am as smitten as I had expected.

I had a feeling when I was sitting at work on Monday. I had a feeling that I’d be seeing goat kids. Of course, if I hadn’t seen goat kids on Monday then I would probably have had the feeling on Tuesday. And Wednesday. And so on, until there were kids. But I did have a feeling…

And when I got to the playground after work I was greeted by Kurt. He was sweeping. And said “Oh good you’re here!”. And then I knew for sure. He told me to go look in the goats’ stable. So I walked in that general direction. And then Pernille came around the corner and she was positively giddy like a school girl. “Oh Lasse we have been looking forward to when you’d come so much, come see!”. And she took me into the stable and there I saw:

Three wonderful goat kids. Actually I only saw two at first. The last one was lying behind Mathilde.

The proud mother. She was in good spirit. I’m sure she was relieved that it was all over. And what a good job she has done. Such beautiful kids. I find it funny that the boy is the one who looks like a mini-version of her. While the girls are different. Nougat almost looks like a half-finished version of Magnethe. She has that same black stripe on the back, but the colour ran out before they could remake Magnethe completely.

You can see the stripe there. While Mathilde nudges her gently on.

You would maybe expect the boy to be the wild and inquisitive one. But in fact he is the little sleepyhead.

Sometimes he’d just stand still while his head slowly lowered itself, like he was dozing off. He was so quiet the first day that Pernille was almost worried about him. I gather that Mathilde has once before had triplets and one of them died. I sure hope it won’t happen this time, that would be horrible.

Oh yes, his name. 3B. Well it was already decided that if Mathilde got a boy then he would be named after his father. Who is in turn named after his father. The grandfather is called Bettefis. The father is called Bettefis’s Bettefis. And the new kid is called Bettefis’s Bettefis’s Bettefis. Which is then shortened to 3B. Although I heard some of the kids call him 3D, which is rather cute as well. The girls’ names are more obvious. They were named while I was there. Pernille named Nougat because of her nougatty colour. And then it obviously followed to call the other girl Vanilje, since she has the white vanilla colour. It was suggested by this girl:

Just one of the (human) kids who loved the new arrivals.

Vanilje was the wild, inquisitive one. She was running around, exploring. She even went outside on her own.

With the reassurance of her mother behind her.

The other two didn’t go out on their own, but Kurt did lift them out so they could see the playground in all its glory.

If you click to see the fullsize picture then you can really appreciate the look Nougat is giving up at Mathilde. So sweet.

They were screaming a lot when they were carried outside. They scream a lot in general. Especially on the first day. Sometimes when they screamed really hard they almost sounded like little human babies.

I think they liked me. Well, Nougat liked my finger at least:

Don’t worry, she didn’t manage to bite it off. But as I said, I think they liked me. They didn’t scream when I held them. But I think that’s mostly because I am a quiet, calm person. The others who wanted to hold them were not so quiet, in fact they were screaming a lot too. “I WANT TO HOLD THAT ONE”, “IT’S MY TURN”, “YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED IN HERE”, “AW LOOK HE’S LICKING ME”, “THAT ONE IS A BOY”, “NO IT’S A GIRL”, “HELP MADS IS COMING!”. And so on. A lot of noise and commotion. As if the world isn’t confusing enough when you’re new to it all.

Mads and Magnethe? They stayed away from most of the ruckus.

I wonder what Magnethe thinks of it all. She’s next. Kurt said it would be a week to 10 days. That’s three days ago. So no longer than a week for her now, at most.

Mads did give the new ones a hard time later on. He sent Nougat literally flying through the air at one point. And Vanilje got a good butting too. He’s being threatened with isolation if he doesn’t behave. He doesn’t like to share the attention. He was good at keeping boys away though. They’re all scared of him. This girl too:

I must find out what her name is. She’s really nice, we often talk. She’s the one who said that I knew everything about goats. Hehe. Kurt and I was trying to get her to be comfortable with Mads. And Kurt said “see Lasse isn’t afraid of Mads”. To which she replied “Yeah, but he knows EVERYTHING about goats”. Sweet. Although I hardly know anything, other than the fact that they are wonderfully fascinating animals.

Do I sound happy? I am. One of the boys took this of me when he borrowed my camera:

All smiles. Holding on to the happiness.

The little sweeties.

Crawling up on me, falling asleep in my lap. Chewing on my pants. Stumbling along on unsure legs. Everybody loves them.

From the littlest girl who can barely hold them to the tallest guy who takes snapshots with his fancy cellphone.

Mothers and daughters, boys and men.

There was a man there who said I should make a book with animal pictures. He had brought a book himself, he said I should take a look at it. I forgot. I’m not sure if it was a book of his own pictures or if it was just a general book that he had brought. But I must remember to take a look at it. I don’t think there is a big market for books with pictures of sheeps and lambs, because let’s face it then everyone would be making those books. It’s not too hard to do with subjects like these. But maybe I should get some kind of book or calendar done. For myself. And a christmas present to my readers, or something. Someone on livejournal suggested cafépress for making a calendar I think. Might be fun.

Who wouldn’t want those sweeties on the wall?

I would love it.

As I love them. I look like I’m the one dozing off there. Pardon the brightness/contrast, but it’s hard taking pictures in the stable. I had to boost some of the pictures a lot, otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to see anything. Sort of like the dark version of the “polar bear in a snowstorm” pictures.

Everything is new to them. Here is Vanilje getting some milk. They had to learn that too. When they drink they butt their heads up to get the milk flowing. But they didn’t know where to get the milk, so they were butting their heads up on random places on Mathilde’s body. Very cute. I helped Vanilje find her way. And of course Mathilde helped them too, pushing them in the right direction.

Sleeping and drinking milk, that’s all they really want and need. A simple life.

And that’s it. If you haven’t got enough of the little, adorable lovelies then you can see more pictures in their very own photo album. I took somewhere around 3-400 pictures the first three days. I narrowed them down to circa 100 shots and then picked 30 to put in the blog. I’m trying not to go too crazy. But the last 70 are in the album. And there will be more in the future, don’t you worry. Just wait till Magnethe’s babies arrive. I don’t know if I’ll be able to control myself…

Finally, thank you all for the nice comments about the pill thing. I am blessed to have friends like you, and I am sincerely honoured by what some of you share with me. I am not alone. And I am perfectly comfortable being medicated. Before I started taking the meds I was very suspicious of them. I didn’t really want to take them. But they have helped me a lot and I’m glad I got on them. Before I was taking meds I was always sad. It wasn’t a matter of thinking negative thoughts or having bad experiences. It was just my default mood. Sad. If something good happened then my mood swung up to okay. If something bad happened then I was miserably, horribly depressed. If nothing happened then I was sad. On medication my default level is okay. If something good happens then I’m happy. If something bad happens then I’m sad. If nothing happens then I’m okay. And that’s how I’d like it to be. I would like to get to a place where I can feel okay without medication. That is something I talk with my therapist about too. Not to expect medication to solve my problems. But it’s a help. And frankly I don’t think I can overcome my problems with social phobia and life in general without the help. It’s now halfway through April and I still haven’t moved out. I was supposed to be doing that in January, if possible. But since my meds stopped working I just haven’t been able to do anything. If the meds can get me to a place where I can handle my life and make improvements then that’s fine with me. I don’t mind supporting the pill industry either. I’m happy and the little pill people can buy food and clothes for their kids. Everybody wins.

No, no. To be serious, I’m not saying that the drug industry is all wonderful and that they’re doing what they do because they love us all so damn much that they just have to. But the meds help me so you can’t tell me I shouldn’t take them. Changing my selfimage is indeed the longterm cure to my problems. The pills are going to help me with that.

If they made a pill that could fix ALL my problems, I’d take it. Depression isn’t my real problem, the social phobia is my real problem. Unfortunately they don’t make a pill for that, as far as I know.

Anyway, enough of that. When you’re holding a little goat kid and feeling its heart beating against you then none of this matters. Your worries are only as big as you let them be.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 14th, 2006 at 23:47 and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.