Lucas - who's your daddy?

I haven't written in quite a while...it's not that I haven't had anything to write about. I just didn't have the time to sit down and write.

I'm going to vent my frustration a little today about the ongoing ordeal with registering one of our crias. You might recall my post back around December when I was registering our three crias Franny, Leroy and Lucas. All went smoothly for Franny and Leroy and we had their ARI certificates in hand within about two weeks.

Lucas has been another story. When I register our crias, I sometimes add an extra "possible herdsire" choice just in case somebody got switched around if we leave more than one female at a farm for breeding with different males. I doubt I will ever do that again. After paying the initial $40 and submitting Lucas' blood sample card, we were later asked to resubmit a new blood sample card - and another $40 - for his dam, Sofie. Oddly enough, there was no problem registering Sofie's previous cria, but now all of a sudden they needed a better sample so they could test for more DNA markers.

Well, that ended up fine and of course his mother is really "his mother". Now it came back that both herdsire choices are a possible match as Leroy's sire! So I paid for yet another blood sample retest for the other herdsire choice (that I don't even own) so that the Alpaca Registry could make up a 14 marker DNA panel to rule out the second choice! I should have gotten the results last week, but they forgot to submit it to the lab.

So this Thursday I will be finding out that Lucas is exactly who I think he is and that I never should have submitted a second choice herdsire when I registered him. All that for $120!!

Say a prayer and keep your fingers crossed that I will have results by this Thursday and won't have to give any more blood or money to get Lucas registered!