Barbara Brooks always gives her kids milk as part of their bedtime snack. All 162 of them. Make that 180, and counting.

Because Brooks – or, as her 11-year-old daughter, Sally, sometimes calls her, “Madame du chevre” – runs the largest dairy goat farm in the state, and this, as they say at her Seal Cove Farm in Lamoine, is “OOEY season.” At farms, homesteads and in 4-H programs all over, goats are delivering babies. Lots of babies. “Freshening,” farmers say, when a female in the herd gives birth and begins to produce milk. As in, “Opal freshened today.”

Which Opal did at Seal Cove Farm in recent weeks. Her twins are among the dozens of four-legged acrobats bleating in the dark, waiting for Brooks to bring that snack. It’s not just numbers that make fixing refreshments for these whiskery kids a little more labor-intensive than popping pizza into the microwave. For one thing, they live a quarter-mile away, up a road scored with ruts while March makes up its mind between freeze and thaw. The older, stronger babies stay outside in what Brooks calls “the condos” – plastic hutches designed to hold one calf and 12 babies at a time.

During “ooey season,” when the barnyard oozes with fluids through February and March, the condos fill fast. Feeding the residents means lugging buckets fitted with 12 nipples each and filled with mothers’ milk to every condo four or five times a day. Each baby receives about 12 ounces per feeding. Multiple feedings means growing babies, and growing babies is what Brooks wants.

But first, she and Sally take turns clambering over the fencing around each condo. They untie the gates lashed with twine, catch the spill of babies bounding for the bucket, secure the bucket inside the condo, squeeze the last kid in and make sure every one has a drinking spot. Then they stand around in their tall rubber boots under the stars (snow, sleet, rain) and listen to the slurp and guzzle. Two minutes, and the bucket’s drained.

Standing in a nearby pen, the five bucks who started “ooey season” in August and September offer no cigars.

“The bucket has left the building!” Sally announces, retrieving empties and cutting twine with her hot- pink Swiss Army knife. She switches off her flashlight, then joins Brooks in the barn to help feed the babies inside. This is where the newest and smaller ones stay, close to the collective heat of 120 does ruminating in the hay. Some nurse directly from their dams. Others latch onto the custom-fitted buckets. The farm’s tiniest pair of babies, Rabbit and Bunny (2 and 3 pounds at birth) still don’t have the knack, so Sally hand-feeds them from clean, old Guinness bottles with nipples for mama’s brew.

Filling kids’ bellies is only part of the nightly routine. Brooks checks other bellies, scanning does she knows are closest to freshening. “This is when we give our little lecture,” she jokes, “about not waking us up in the middle of the night.”

“Hey, everybody!” Sally commands, nuzzling a cluster of babies sacked out in a hay-feeder and scratching a new mama’s head. “No having babies until morning! About 7:30 would be perfect. If you have a baby tonight, you’ll be seriously grounded. OK?”

In fact, it’s just after 4 a.m. when Brooks puts on her ice-grippers and crunches up the hill to the barn with her 11-year-old border collie, Jolly, and Jolly’s granddaughter, Sophie, racing ahead under an almost purple sky. During Brooks’ first few kidding seasons, she often slept in the barn, afraid something would go wrong during a delivery or that a new mother might step or roll onto a baby.

Twenty-five years into the business, she’s seen that 90-95 percent are “textbook births,” following patterns of does in the wild. “Most of the babies are born between 5 and 7 a.m.,” she says, “with the rest between 8 and noon. It’s usually wrapped up by early afternoon. Early morning is the more sensible time to deliver, because the babies need time to get it together. They’ve gotta get cleaned. Stand up. Feed. It’s the stronger time of day.”

It’s also, as Brooks might say, the ooeiest.

“Good morning, ladies,” Brooks says, entering the barn. Goats rush up, nibbling her jacket, nipping her jeans. “Chill out, would you, Viola? Mrs. Hodgdon … (who’s named for one of Sally’s teachers), get DOWN!”

Gathering the does for morning and evening milking takes longer during kidding season because Brooks can’t use Jolly to round them up. “The mama goats think she’s a wolf and would kick the tar out of her.” So Jolly crouches behind a door in the milking parlor, sharp-eyed and anxious to work, watching Brooks rearrange metal gates inside the barn to pen the does for milking.

Brooks notices Eva, a 6-year-old Toggenburg, pawing in a corner, showing the earliest signs of going into labor. Eva stands, kneels, rolls over, fusses. “She’s thinkin’ about it,” Brooks says. Eva just grunts.

By the time Brooks has finished milking, fed the inside and outside babies, gone back to the house to eat breakfast with Sally, and returned to the barn, it’s 9:42 a.m. and Eva is licking a 7-pound doe. Both mother and baby look a little, well, ooey.

So does the red and gold puddle of afterbirth, which Candy Conley, one of Brooks’ many volunteers and friends of the farm, scuffs over with shavings. (“In the wild,” Brooks notes, “the mothers eat it. Here, when they give birth in their bedding, it’s not exactly herbivore material.”)

But Eva isn’t quite finished. She’s still grunting and pawing, as another ruddy bubble of amniotic sac swells and contracts, then bursts. Baby No. 2 pushes from Eva’s clipped behind and lands in the shavings. (“Dairy clips” happen in January, when Brooks and Conley shave around the does’ udders and flanks to prepare for deliveries, which can include triplets.)

Once Eva has finished cleaning the second doe and it has wobbled to its feet, Brooks or Conley will take it to a sling hanging from the scale in the milking parlor and weigh it. Eventually, depending on how reliably Eva has milked and how strong her babies appear, Brooks will either tattoo one of their ears with green ink to mark them as this year’s replacement stock or add them to the numbers bound for the Italian butcher who calls every season before Easter to ask, “You got any kid?”

“I breed for milk production,” Brooks says. “That means good strong girls from dams that are high producers.” This year, she plans to keep about 30 of more than 200 kids expected. Sally and Gard, Brooks’ 16-year-old son, tend to fall in love with the tiniest ones, and tiny kids rarely receive the green tattoo. But Brooks says her children have learned there will be “other babies to love. Because ‘milk’ is the operative word.”

Milk, of course, means cheese. Seal Cove Farm averages 500-700 pounds of it a week. Camilla Stege, who lives in Sullivan and is the farm’s only full-time employee, molds, weighs and wraps it, with strains of classical music floating through the cheese room as she works. It’s local chevre come full circle: Stege raised goats from 1972 to 1985, milked by hand, and taught Brooks in one of the first cheese-making classes she offered at her farm in the late ’70s.

At that point, Brooks was a nontraditional student earning a degree in animal science from the University of Maine. She was also running a B&B in the Mount Desert Island village of Seal Cove and a diversified farm that included turkeys, chickens, eggs and 5,000 heads of lettuce a year. “I wanted to have a goat,” Brooks says. “Some people from Surry brought me a Saanen, a white goat, named Jill. Then somebody else gave me two more. Goats are very prolific. By the time I moved the farm here in 1996 to see if I could make a go of it, I had 40 does. By the next year, 80. I thought 100 would be about right. Now I have 120, and it turns out 120 is just right.”

Brooks sold her first cheese to Sawyer’s Market in Southwest Harbor in 1981. Now she has two distributors making Seal Cove Farm chevre available from Orono to as far south as Washington, D.C. Connoisseurs along the lactation curve agree that the flavor of the goat cheese going to market during this season is fabulous. Stege explains why.

“The does produce more milk in the first three weeks of kidding season than in the whole rest of their lactation period,” she says. “The flavor of the cheese right now is so clean and tangy. You don’t get such a distinct, fresh taste any other time of the year.”

You also don’t get a chance to see baby goats springing up dirty snowdrifts to play king of the mountain or step into the barn at dawn and watch them zooming around, as Brooks puts it, “like the Indianapolis 500.” You don’t get to check on Eva’s kids, 11 hours old, curled together in a stall, sleeping. Sometimes, 10 or 20 does freshen in a day, and between keeping up with the afterbirth and sorting out babies, that day can turn what Brooks calls “plenty ooey.”

Alice and Retty and Mrs. Hodgdon are still waiting to deliver. Tomorrow could be one of those days.

Barbara Brooks will hold an open house at Seal Cove Farm 1-3 p.m. Sunday. The farm is located on Route 204 in Lamoine, about 21/2 miles from the Lamoine Town Hall, phone: 667-7127.