We Have a Baby!

We did it! We have our first baby calf! Well, we didn’t actually do anything. Luckily everything went smoothly from beginning to end. You remember the song lyric “my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard”? That’s what happened last summer- literally. And apparently our little “Rumpshaker” (one of our black Angus heifers) was the one advertising it since she’s the only one who’s calved so far. Ed was coming home from work one morning just as I was going out to feed and stopped his car 3/4 of the way up the driveway, arm pointing out the window, “There’s a cow in the yard and it’s not one of ours.” Nope, sure wasn’t. In fact, it wasn’t a cow at all but a nice looking red bull. We were fairly sure he was from across the road but couldn’t reach the neighbors on their cell phone. Luckily he was a friendly guy and with a little coaxing of the feed bucket and an open gate to a field of girls we got him contained. It was fairly obvious that he’d come over to visit with them anyways. The neighbors happened to be on vacation so we kept an eye on him for a couple days until they got back. By that time it was plenty muddy and more difficult to get a trailer in to load him up. They didn’t need him back just yet and we were going to be in need of a bull, so “Willie” came to stay with us for several weeks. (The conversations that came up with a nine-year old over the next week or so might be saved for another post LOL.)

I’m not sure that I’ve introduced our girls properly. We have Rumshaker, Salt, Pepa, and Matilda. Matilda is the red white faced cow (a mix of breeds we can only guesstimate) that I got for Mother’s Day last year. The other three are Angus/Angus cross heifers we purchased the fall before. “Salt” has a bit of Charolais in her, hence the fact that she’s white and how she earned her name. Rumpshaker and Pepa are full black Angus. Readers…girls. Girls…readers. Introductions done.

By the time Lando and I get home from work and school then get our stuff out of the car and sorted out it’s usually getting fairly dark. He takes care of feeding the barn cats and closing up the chickens while I feed the fat steers. We know calves are due this month so we’ve been peeking in on the girls every evening to make sure all is well. Monday evening there were only 3 of them relaxing in the barn. I did a quick scan with the flashlight and it didn’t take long to find the missing girl. And there was an extra set of shiny eyeballs looking back at me! I actually squealed out loud! I ran back to the house as quick as I could through cow-hoof sized mud pockets to grab Lando and my phone. (Ed was out of town or I’d have grabbed him too-just FYI-not purposely leaving him out of the excitement.) We stood out there for a good little bit waiting to see it nurse and try to get a halfway decent picture. Neither of which really happened. But it was super exciting none the less!

I think the fact that it was dark made it even more exciting in a way. There was still that little bit of mystery about what he/she looked like. We were pretty sure it was red but couldn’t be certain that the hint of redness we saw wasn’t from flashlights instead. There’s that nervousness though too- did momma let it nurse? Did she have milk? What if it’s leg was broken somehow? What if there was a twin that we didn’t see? Or one that she hadn’t calved yet? All the nervous questions of a first-time cow mom went through my head.

We shared the good news with Ed via a grainy, night time, zoomed-in-from-a-phone-camera picture. I felt like he should be the first to know, but then promptly sent the same picture to a couple of others who I knew would understand our excitement 🙂 Tuesday morning brought a calf bouncing around momma with no broken legs and obvious energy from being allowed to nurse from an udder full of milk. Now all we can do is wait for the others to arrive so we’ll have a pasture full of bouncing playmates!

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