Two strikes and your hamburger

At least that’s going to be the rule for the bovine denizens or our place.

The story behind this:

We have a heifer that calved early yesterday morning. This is her second calf and so we wrongly assumed that since the calf was up and moving and so was mom that nature would take its course and all would be fine.

Ooooohhhhh how wrong we were. This heifer has got to be the worst mother I have ever seen. She dropped or stepped on her first calf and it had a bum leg and couldn’t stand after it was born. We were able to get it up and moving and then she refused to feed it. The Dh had to back her against the stall and make her stand still so the poor thing could eat, and he had to do this three or four times a day until the calf was about 4 days old and able to get up and down on its own.

So about 6:30 last night the Dh’s oldest brother called and mentioned that momma cow was in the top pasture but the baby was nowhere to be seen. The Dh and I took the truck out and drove around the bottom pasture where we found ...... nothing! So we drove the top pasture, still no baby. Supper is ready so we go eat, then round up the kids and head back out around 7:45 to search the pastures on foot.

Forty-five minutes later one of the boys finds the poor thing. It was about five feet beyond the fence down by the creek and had obviously been there for quite sometime. We loaded it on the four-wheeler and took it back to the barn, were the momma cow doesn’t seem to want to let it eat. Dh backs her against the stall and tries to help the calf get started suckling. It appears however that mom hasn’t let her milk down. He works for almost thirty minutes before he can get milk out of her and then the baby doesn’t seem to know how or what to do. *big groan* Did I mention the temps are still in the 90’s, it is hotter than hell in the barn and momma cow continually swings her tail and hits Dh in the head. And her tail ...... eeeeeewwwww I won’t even mention how totally nasty her tail was. Another thirty minutes and Dh has milked about a pints worth out the momma, which we poured in a bottle and baby sucked right down when he figured out what it was. Then miracles of miracles he headed straight for mom and started to chow down.

We locked them in the small enclosure by the barn last night and they seem to be okay this morning. We didn’t actually see him eat this morning but when I offered him a bottle of starter milk he wasn’t interested so we hope that means he had already eaten. There is a smaller pasture on one side of the barn and we let them out into it, instead of with the other cows and have been checking on the pair off and on all day. This evening I’ll offer the little guy another bottle of starter milk and see what happens. Ideally someone will see him nursing and we will know that all is well in that area.

Dh says when the baby is weaned, momma heifer goes either to the butcher or the stockyards, she's had two chances and blown them both so he's getting rid of her one way on another.

Our First Day of School

Well, today was our first official day of school for this year. The boys were at Starbase camp last week and I always count those as school days but today was the day we got out the notebooks and started the school year in earnest.

It didn’t have an auspicious start. I woke up at 5:30 with a major headache, my neck hurting and sick to my stomach; the alarm was set to go off at 6:00 so that we could get to the gym early and be home and ready to start school by 9:00.

Well, the alarm went off at 6:00 as planned, and I hit the snooze, 9 minutes later it went off again and I hit the snooze once more, the third time I thought screw this and turned the alarm off. I woke at 7:00 and thought about getting up but decided to give myself 30 more minutes and finally I managed to crawl out of bed at 7:30. I know this seems late for those of you who might have to be at work at 8:00 but I am so not a morning person.

Got the kids up, and we got ready for the gym; today was weight training so it was after 9:30 by the time we finished. I had two quick errands to run and decided since we were already running late to do them while we were in town instead of having to come back later.

After arriving home, eating breakfast and getting morning chores out of the way we finally started school at 11:00. *sigh* Of course the kids wanted to break for lunch at noon and being the horrible mean mother/teacher that I am I made them wait till 1:00. *rolling eyes* It didn’t seem to do any permanent damage seeing as how they didn’t eat breakfast until 10:00.

Since my boys are older I don’t usually sit at the table with them while they do their work. I try to clean and do laundry in between helping them when needed, working on the subjects we do together, and trying to grade work as they finish. Today they were of course particularly needy, and seemed to pick on each other constantly so by 4:30 my headache was back with a vengeance. I told them to finish up their work and I headed to the tub for a nice long bubble bath.

We ended up having carryout pizza for dinner [who wants to cook in a 104 degree heat], I have three loads of jeans waiting to be folded and I never did get to the store for dog food but there’s always tomorrow. And surprisingly we managed to get everything done on their assignment sheets except for their history and we’ll double up on that tomorrow.