No Easy Task

I had this (what seemed to be a) great idea to milk one of our goats and make goat cheese. I looked forward to it all week. I found what I thought was the best (and easiest) recipe online, bought cheesecloth's at the store and picked a jar I thought would work best. By the time Saturday came I was ready. You and me mama goat - it's on.

Saturday arrives. I head out to help with the chores and to milk my goat. The first thing I realize is I have to catch the goat. I guess I just thought  the goat would just be there waiting for me, ready and willing to be milked. Riight.

Once reality hit I turned to J and asked you are going to help me, right? I enlisted J to help me for obvious reasons one being my safety. I have yet to be hit aka rammed by a goat or a sheep and it's not something that I have on my To-Do list. I've heard it hurts.

J catches her after a few failed attempts and we pen her up so she can't run off in the middle of milking.
I milk the goat for about 5 minutes and realize she's low on milk. Perfect. I leave this mama penned up and we head inside to have breakfast. I figured by the time I come back she'll have a little more milk. We were only gone for a little while and when we got back the goat was gone! It's like a hoodini goat. Gone. We look around for the mama along with the rest of the goat gang and they are nowhere to be found. Fail #1

We head off in search of the goat gang and figure at this point we'll just catch any mama we can. We spot them and realize they aren't going to make this an easy task.

After working them off the cliff J gets on the side of one and I get on another. That doesn't work. I grab her babies in hopes she will come toward them and that doesn't work either. What type of mother are you goat?! Then J gets a little frustrated and just goes after her. He's like a goat ninja - he caught her.

We put this mama on her back and realize she has a real badly chapped nipple and I didn't want to take all her milk from her one good nipple, she has two babies to feed. We let her go and with her left my hopes for goat cheese. Fail #2

To say the least my attempt at milking the goats was an epic fail. After all that excitement and work I walked away with this:

I went inside with my head hanging low, my pitiful jar of almost nothing and decided I'd try my hand at painting instead since you can't really fail at that or maybe you can....