My week started off a little bittersweet. Our first baby-to-freezer calf went off to slaughter first thing Monday morning. My husband’s not as sentimental about it as I have been. No, he’s not the first of our cattle to go to slaughter or the sale barn. No, he wasn’t a pet. In fact, there’s probably one half a dozen times I’ve actually been able to touch him. But we got him at less than a week old and he’d been here ever since. I can’t NOT name an animal so we named him Vandergrift even though we knew from the beginning that he would one day grace our table. Twice a day for the last 14 ½ months we have fed him, talked to him, and watched him do what cows do.
Tuesday evening wasn’t much easier. We loaded up another calf, Britt, to take to the sale barn drop off location. Britt was literally my baby. His momma (who belonged to the neighbor) abandoned him while he was still wet from birth. Luckily my husband spotted him, called the neighbor, and they tried to reunite the two. Unfortunately, none of the cows in the herd stepped up to claim him. At the time, we had a dairy cow (Vandergrift’s adopted momma actually) so we hoped that she would let him nurse. No such luck- she didn’t want anything to do with him. As you can imagine, newborn calves don’t survive very long without milk. The neighbor summed it up nicely by saying, “If you hadn’t found him, he’d have died. So if you want to try and save him, he’s yours.” Up early in the morning to try again before heading to work for a few hours but we got the same results. The little guy didn’t even know how to nurse a bottle so in came YouTube and we learned how to tube feed him! This involves passing a tube over the tongue, down into the stomach and letting gravity take the milk down while being scared to death you passed the tube “down the wrong pipe” and accidentally drown the poor guy. (I am a firm believer that you can learn how to do ANYTHING on YouTube!) If this wasn’t sounding chaotic enough, we had company coming over that afternoon. A lot of company as a matter of fact. So, in between grilling and entertaining, I constantly checked on our new addition. A friend, and Britt’s would-be namesake, went out to the barn with me each time; both of us crossing our fingers that he was still alive. Obviously, we all made it through those first rough days.
And now it’s Wednesday…I sure hope the rest of the week is less emotional…