Farm Life

Today I wanted to share a story I wrote early last spring:

I talked last week about how slippery it has been in our pasture—especially with a skift of snow on top of a thin layer of ice on top of some wet mud.

We got a lot of rain last Monday night, so our creek was swollen, the pastures were saturated, and it was too muddy and slick for even Watson to drive through, so we walked out to check the cows.

We have around twenty cows that should freshen in the next six weeks or so, so we’re keeping a pretty close eye on them.

Tuesday morning, Watson fed the cows, then he came back to the house and got me.

Now, I talked some about Watson last week. He’s a machinery guy. He loves tractors and equipment and anything with a motor and wheels. He knows them, understands them, and is really intuitive at driving and fixing them.

I’m kinda the cow person.

Watson loves his cows. I mean, really, he loves them, but when it comes to actually knowing about them, that’s really me.

Anyway, it was too wet and muddy to drive, so we had to walk. I think that’s why he wanted me, but also in case we had a cow with a calf. I have a better knack for knowing what to do in a pinch, if that makes sense.

We have about ten or so cows who were bred to a Hereford bull who are going to freshen in the next few weeks—four of them already have. These cows will have black-bodied calves with white faces.

Our other cows who are going to freshen will have solid black calves. They’ve been bred to our Jesse James/Penn State bull, and these calves are going to be really nice beef.

So, as Watson and the two little girls and I were walking through the herd while they were eating the hay on the ground, we’re looking at the cows we know are going to calve and we’re counting the little white-faced calves. Watson and I think there should be four, one of our girls is insisting there should be five.

Ha.

So, we’re trying to figure that out, and we’ve counted three so far and we’re missing the solid black heifer that had been born the day before and was a little sluggish. We thought she’d eaten, but I like to keep an eye on them for a couple of days and make sure they can find their lunch okay. Also, we’d gotten a lot of rain overnight. We wanted to lay eyes on her and make sure she was good.

Well, we couldn’t find her—she wasn’t with the herd, and her mama, 116A, was down by the creek bawling.

Also, as we continued to head toward the creek, we realized there was another cow—122—who was down there bawling, too, and who hadn’t had her calf when we’d checked them Monday night.

So, we have two cows down by the creek—116A has a calf we can’t find, and 122 MUST have a calf, although we haven’t seen it yet. Cows on grass and hay aren’t really like women. I know I need to be careful here, because you can’t always tell when a lady has had a baby, but…let me say it like this: grass-fed cows have hay bellies, while grain-fed cows are usually sleeker with less of a barrel look.

And…moving RIGHT along, LOL, Watson and the girls and I reach the creek on the bottom corner of the pasture, and we start walking up along it, looking. It’s cold, and there are patches of snow on the ground, but the ground isn’t frozen and mud sucks at our feet with every step.

The girls get ahead of us (because, kids, right? LOL), and Watson and I are talking strategy and where we’d last seen 116A and her little girl and why we’d decided she’d eaten and where we think she might be.

So, the girls get about halfway across the pasture with Watson and I about twenty yards behind them.

They yell back, “We found one!” and Watson and I get to the bend in the creek and see the little heifer we were worried about, lying down at the edge of the creek at the bottom of a six-foot drop-off.

Now, I mentioned we’d gotten a lot of rain the night before. The creek is up—although not like it’s been in the past—it’s muddy and deep, but it wouldn’t be over my head and the current wouldn’t sweep me away. But it would be strong enough to knock a newborn calf down. Or, more likely, if the calf were to fall, the current would be strong enough to keep it from getting back up, since newborns have trouble balancing anyway.

The girls are ahead of us, and they go about fifteen yards up the creek to where the bank slopes down. We just need the heifer to get up and walk those fifteen yards to get out of the creek.

Well, the girls haven’t chased cows much, and I guess they really don’t realize how precarious the situation is.

They run to the slope, and my youngest plows into the water, splashing across (and realizing it’s a little deeper than she was expecting—over her boots).

The other girl is a little older, and she goes more slowly, which seems wise, but maybe wasn’t, because the mud is pretty deep there, and she gets both of her boots stuck in the mud.

The girls have made a lot of noise (they’re girls—there is laughing and giggling and squealing as they get wet and stuck), and the calf has gotten up and started running—in the exact wrong direction—and the creek goes from about 1-1/2 feet deep to about 3 feet deep.

It trips.

Its head goes under the water.

I race toward the bank, and I do something I never do—I yell at the girls.

I yell at my youngest to turn and face the bank (a cow will always choose to avoid a face, but they will run toward a back. I don’t know why, but this is a truth), and I yell at my other daughter to get out of there, because the calf isn’t going to run in that direction while she’s standing at the only spot where it can get out.

I didn’t realize that both of her feet are stuck, and in fact, as I look, I realize that she’s lost a boot and has one stocking foot in the freezing cold water of the creek while she’s trying to pull her other foot out, which is still stuck in the mud.

She yells, “I’ve lost a boot, and my other foot is stuck!”

I yell back (at the same time the calf has gotten its head out of the water and I’m reaching down the six-foot bank—I REALLY don’t want to go in the water—and waving my hand in front of its face, and I’ve gotten it partially turned, but it doesn’t want to move forward because my daughter is RIGHT where it needs to go), “Forget about your boot and get out of there!”

The water is icy—my daughter yanked her second foot out of her stuck boot and is now in two stocking feet struggling through the knee-deep mud to get out of the way—the calf is shivering and exhausted, and I’m shaking because while I didn’t run that far—only thirty yards or so—the mud was sucking at my feet the whole time and my legs feel like Jello, partly because I’m not used to running with suction cups on the bottoms of my feet and partly because my brain has already gone to pneumonia—in the calf and the girl—and I don’t want to watch this baby drown right in front of me.

I’m on my hands and knees on the bank waving my hands trying to get the calf to turn around. As my daughter leaves her boots behind and scrambles up the slope, she scares the calf, and it turns and starts back toward the deep water.

My youngest daughter scooted along the edge of the bank—with her back toward the calf—until she was well behind it, and she splashes across the creek toward the calf as Watson hands me a long stick.

Between us, we get the calf moving, and we pass the stuck boots as the calf climbs tremulously out of the bank and is reunited with her mother.

I go back and slide down the slope, grabbing first one boot, then the other, and pull them out of the mud. I’ve done that multiple times—lost my boots in mud. I’ve actually completely lost a pair of sneakers—like lost, lost, where I couldn’t find them. [And I’m saying mud, but where there are cows… : ) ]

I help my daughter get her boots back on, apologize to both of them for yelling at them—they said I could do it once every decade or so, LOL—and I send them up to the house to get out of their wet clothes and get dry, asking them to go by way of the deep gully and make sure there aren’t any calves in it, because, while we’ve gotten 116A and her calf reunited, 122 is bawling like her heart is broken, and we haven’t seen any sign of hers yet.

Watson and I follow the creek up to the other end of the pasture—he crosses it, and even in this normally shallow spot, the water is over the tops of his boots—and we walk both banks the entire way back down the pasture, checking the woods on the other side, in case it crossed the creek and got through the fence, and looking at the few spots along the creek where it might have gotten tangled up in tree roots.

Okay, I’m going to be blunt now and admit I’m also looking for any sign of black hair waving in the water. Our calves might be 60-80 pounds when they’re born, give or take, but newborns don’t have great balance, and it doesn’t take much—a little bit of current—to knock them down.

I know, if a calf fell in the creek the way it was up from all the rain, it would get carried downstream and drown on its way down. The body would be hung up on a rock or a root or a bunch of debris. Even though it was still muddy, I could tell the creek had gone down some from its overnight high, and I figured if the calf was born even a few hours before—or more—the current and depth would have been worse.

122 is still standing at the same spot—right beside the creek, almost in the middle of the pasture—bawling while Watson and I slowly walk the entire length of the pasture.

When I reach the fence, I climb through it into the next pasture. The creek flows the whole way around the bottom of that pasture and on through another one before it empties into the river. Watson says, “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to follow the creek on down.”

He kind of looks at me. I say, “Did you check the woods real good? The calf will be able to get through the fence while the mom can’t. It could be up there holed up in the woods.”

“If it’s up there, we’ll never find it.”

“Well, we have to, because she obviously has no idea where it is.”

He looks at me again, and then he looks down the creek where I’m going. It’s cold out, but I’m hot. I have sweat running down my back, which should make me shiver, but while I feel the trickle along my skin, I’m not cold.

I don’t have a good feeling—that upset stomach feeling that your heart gets when you know things just aren’t going to turn out the way you want.

Watson knows if I go down the creek and find the calf, it’s just going to be a body.

Watson doesn’t give up much better than I do.

He grits his jaw and looks back the way he just came. Then he calls over the creek, “I’m going to go back up through and just focus on the woods. It’s gotta be there somewhere.”

We both know it doesn’t have to be there.

It could be downstream.

I jerk my chin, then start slowly through the next pasture, following the creek, looking hard at any place along the edge where a calf might have pulled itself out and be lying there shivering.

I’m also looking at the water, watching for a wave of black fur. Or the graceful lift of a limp little tail moving up and down with the current.

I’ve made it a slow thirty yards—the creek deepens, and I’m really searching the water for a black shadow, when I’m scanning up the creek and I see Watson walking toward me.

I think he knows too. He looks all tough, but honestly, he’s softer than I am about this kind of thing.

He changed his mind, obviously, about going back up, and I don’t ask why, but I guess it’s because he doesn’t want me to find the body by myself.

We slowly walk downstream, across the creek from each other, him on one side, me on the other, going slow through this deeper part.

Watson swears.

My eyes fly to his face, judge the trajectory of his gaze, and go back to the water while my heart falls.

I’m still searching.

“It’s right there,” Watson says, and I see the fur, lifted by the current, before it falls again. The body is almost completely submerged.

Watson climbs down the bank, fishes in the water for a hoof, and drags a big, beautiful, dead bull calf out of the muddy water.

Up the creek, in the other pasture, 122’s bawling cry cuts through the air again, and as I stand there looking at her baby, I know she’ll be bawling all day today and all night and all day tomorrow, standing up there by the creek and hoping her baby comes back.

Of course, he’s not going to.

Now, I don’t know what everyone else thinks when something like this happens. Maybe they don’t. It’s probably easier that way. But I’m looking at the calf and I’m running through my mind, trying to figure out what we could have done to have saved him.

“What a waste,” Watson says. 122 bawls again. “She raised one of our best-looking steers last year.”

It’s pretty heartbreaking to hear her cry and to stand there looking at her baby and knowing her distress is in vain, but I’m not going to cry, and I’m not going to get angry (at what???), although I kind of feel like I want to do either or both.

“Man, this reeks,” Watson says, frustrated.

I agree, and I can hardly stand to hear 122. But I say, “I know the upper pasture is smaller and it’s going to be a muddy mess, but I think we should move the whole herd up there, close the gate, and keep them there. That way they only have access to about fifteen yards of the creek, and it’s all shallow.”

Watson is probably having just as hard a time as I am listening to 122. “I’ll feed them up there tonight, and we’ll shut the gate while they’re eating.”

We walk up and get the Gator—this pasture isn’t as muddy as the other—and we go down and drive across the creek, stopping where the calf is over the bank.

Watson goes down and grabs a leg; I stay up and pull Watson’s other hand as we drag it up the bank and over to the Gator.

He takes the front legs and I take the back, and we swing him up. He’s heavy, and I can barely get my end up. We stand there and look at him—a nice, beefy bull calf and a hard loss, from a business perspective and from a heart perspective.

Finally, Watson says, “I guess if it were all peaches and cream, everyone would be doing it.” He pushes away from the Gator and moves to the door. “Just gotta take the hit and move on. It stinks, though.”

Which, of course, reminded me of a verse from the Bible which also reminded me of something God’s nudged me about more than once over the years—that struggle and hardship and loss make us stronger, and they also make us appreciate our success more, as well as help us to put things that aren’t quite as important into better perspective.

It’s a lesson I need over and over, because any time things get hard, it’s always tempting to quit, to complain, and to pray that God gets me out of this or at least fixes it for me.

It happens with our kids, too, right? We want to fix everything for them. We hate seeing them suffer. We want to pad the playground and keep anything bad from ever happening to them. But just as God allows the rain to fall in our lives, we’re doing our kids a disservice if we protect them from the rain in theirs.

It’s funny because that night, Julia had an issue she was talking to me about, and as she was leaving my room, she said, “I love talking to you because you always make me realize that my problems aren’t as bad as I think they are. You’re just so chill.”

Ha. That was kinda funny to me since I had just yelled at the other girls that day, but that really is another good thing that comes from walking through pain and loss. We get to share the (very small bit of) wisdom we’ve learned with others. It’s a good feeling.

That’s actually just the tip of the iceberg of the week that we had last week, but again, the pain and the loss and the suffering is hard, but it’s always for our good.

Thanks so much for spending time with me this week!

Happy April! It’s so nice to be here with you again today.

Now, I know some of you have figured out that a lot of the things in my books are based on my real-life experiences on the farm. It’s not just about the adventures we have, but it’s also about relationships and the care of them that I love including in my stories.

The real-life story I wanted to tell you today has a little of both – adventure and the care and handling of relationships. : )

It’s been wet here in Virginia, and the two connected pastures where our cows are rather muddy. They’re also very steep—too steep to plant—which is why they’re pasture.

Last Thursday as it started to snow, Watson drove out to check the cows. I rode along. I think he likes me to go, that way he has someone to try to scare while he’s driving. (Any of you have husbands like that?)

The temps were right around freezing, so there was mud, then a little bit of ice on the top of the mud. It wasn’t frozen solid, just had a slippery crust on it. Then, with the snow coming down, there was a dusting of even more slippery snow on top of the slippery ice on top of the slippery mud.

Did I mention it was slippery?

I’m going to complain about my husband a bit, so I think I’d better start out by admitting that I am not a good driver. I mean, I am a very courteous driver who absolutely never gets angry while driving. I just don’t. (No matter what some other driver does to me, I know I have done much worse—on accident—to someone else. How can I get upset at anyone?)

I know I’m a bad driver, though, because I have totaled two cars.

Enough about me. Let me tell you about my husband. : )

We drive into the pasture and pretty much slide almost to the bottom. By the way, at the bottom of the pasture is the creek. A fence separates the upper pasture from the lower one.

So, we have the Gator in four-wheel drive, and we drive along the creek, checking the other bank for mama cows who want a little privacy to have their babies.

There’s nothing there on Thursday, but because of the snow falling, it’s a really good day for a cow to freshen, so we go around the fence. Watson tells me to “hang on” while he goes through the bottom of the gully as fast as he can to try to get a run to make it up the other side of the hill.

It was a good idea.

We make it halfway up.

There’s a gully on our left side (it deepens fast and is a favorite spot for new mamas to have their babies), and the fence is behind us. We’re stopped, but the wet mud, ice, and snow has made it so if we start backward, then turn sideways, we’ll slid downhill.

Watson kind of excels in situations like this.

We’re sitting on the hill in the Gator, I’ve got a hold of the door handle and the handle (that was so thoughtfully provided) on the dash, and Watson looks at me and says, “Now what?”

You know how when you’re in a situation like that and your brain is going a hundred miles an hour and you have all these thoughts? Well, one of my thoughts was that I should have put my seatbelt on.

The Gator actually does have seatbelts, but while I wear it religiously in my car (and you know who doesn’t, right?), we never wear them around the farm because you’re getting in and out all the time, to check cows and open gates and roll bales out, etc. It would be a real pain in the tush to put a belt on and off.

I’m honestly not even sure they work, since no one has ever actually worn one.

Anyway, I’m sitting there thinking this would be a good time to test the seatbelt out, but while my brain is coming up with all these really good thoughts, I can’t get my hands to work. (It might have something to do with there not being a crowbar in the cab of the Gator to pry my fingers off the handles.)

Maybe I’m the only one who has this problem, but my husband never wants my advice before we get into trouble. It’s always when we’re sitting in the middle of a mess that he suddenly remembers that I might have something to add to the conversation.

So, he’s waiting on me to answer him. Ha.

So I say, “I’m pretty sure we’re going to hit the fence.”

He looks over his shoulder, behind us. The fence is about thirty yards straight down the slippery hill. “Yeah.”

“It’s old, and we’re going to flatten it.”

He doesn’t need to look this time. Instead, he looks at me and gives me that grin that says he knows he should be in deep trouble, but he’s really looking forward to this. His eyes kind of sparkle as he says, “Yeah.”

I’m not going to waste my energy getting upset. There’s no point. So I say, “But that fence needs to be replaced anyway, so really, someone needs to take it out. Why not us?”

“Good point,” he says, just before he releases the brake, yanks the wheel to the left, and guns the gas.

Watson’s goal is (apparently) to slide around parallel to the fence with enough momentum to run along the edge of it as we slide downhill, hitting the gully at the lowest point, just above the corner fence post, and slipping around the fence.

We almost make it.

We smack the fence with the hard plastic part of my door. To my great surprise, the fence holds, we slide around, and when we finally stop about three centimeters from the edge of the creek, I wind my window down and stick my head out, noting that there isn’t even a scratch on the Gator.

Our bull (all two thousand plus pounds of him) is in the creek, slightly disturbed at our untimely and rather rude arrival.

I don’t know how many of you have ever looked a bull in the eye before, but he’s got his head up and is staring right at us. I’m sorry, I don’t mean this to be rude, but bulls just do not look smart.

Anyway, Watson and I are staring at him, and I say, “I’m pretty sure in our marriage contract it says that if we get stuck in mud, it’s your job to get out and push.”

I’m also pretty sure that Watson never read our marriage contract. Actually, I know he didn’t, since there’s no such thing, but I’ve been using this line for years and he’s never caught on. Most recently, I’ve been using it about the dryer, since for the last ten months, our dryer hose has been plugged somewhere and our dryer hasn’t been getting the clothes dry.

This annoys me, since I’m the one who runs the dryer. I’ve asked him to fix it (since it states in our marriage contract that anything that needs to be fixed under the house is his job), but he insists that there’s no problem with the dryer, I’m just not smart enough to run it.

Hmm.

So, I was kind of patient about it for a while, but lately I’ve been folding his clothes wet and putting them in the closet like that. It annoys him, so then both of us are annoyed, which seems fair to me.

Last week, he was getting ready to leave for Pennsylvania, realized the clothes in the closet were wet, took them all back down to the dryer, and put them back in.

After he left, I realized he’d taken them out but hadn’t folded them or taken them back up or put them away. So…I’m annoyed again, and I carry the basket up (which I’ve already done once—I’ve also already folded the clothes, and I’ve already put them away!) So…I’d really like to say that I did it all again with a smile, but…I didn’t. Instead, I open up the closet and…dump my husband’s clothes on the floor before I slam the door shut.

Right. You know how you feel guilty about something even as you’re doing it, but you just can’t stop?

So, anyway, that night, the girls made me watch the movie, I Still Believe. I know it’s been out for a while, but I’ve never seen it. Has anyone who’s seen it watched it without crying? LOL. So, I’m sitting there while a trio of sobs is sounding from the girls, and I’m saying to myself, “I will not cry, I will not cry, I WILL NOT CRY.”

I’m not sure why it is so important that I not cry during movies, but it’s a thing for me. So, I don’t cry, but through the whole movie, God keeps reminding me about the clothes on the closet floor and how I should be grateful for what I have rather than being a brat about what I don’t.

That’s really not what the movie is about, but it’s funny how we see the lesson we need.

So, yeah, the girls go to bed.

I go upstairs and pick up the clothes from the floor of the closet, fold them, and put them away neatly.

Then I get my computer, sit down on the floor, and Google dryer vent hose.

After I’m done with that, the internet is (surprisingly) still working, so I watch a couple YouTube videos on replacing window and door screens. Even though it says quite clearly in our marriage contract that Watson is also responsible for fixing the screens (okay, it doesn’t say that, either), I’m still working on this kindness thing (that I’ve been working on for decades) and why in the world should I be getting annoyed about the dryer and screens when I’m quite capable of fixing them myself [I think : ) ]!

Anyway, I left off with Watson and I staring at the bull.

While Watson is probably never going to fix my dryer or screens, have I mentioned that he is a fantastic driver?

He managed (somehow) to get us out of there, without falling into the creek, without either of us having to push, and Mr. Bull only got a little bit of mud slung on him. I eventually got my fingers pried off the door handles, and eventually (several days later), Watson quit grinning.

Alright, I’m having a huge party in my Facebook Reader Chat this week and I would just love for you all to join me here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/jessiegussman

Thanks so much for spending time with me this week!

 

The question I get the most from people is “How do you find the time to write?” I’ve also been asked what my day looks like. So, I thought today would be a good day to post this newsletter essay I wrote a couple years ago:

I thought I would just let you know what I did yesterday. It was kind of typical, in that there is no typical, if that makes sense. Although Julia wasn’t home all day, and that’s not exactly normal. Also, I had off from packing eggs.

Well, I slept in and I didn’t get up until after six. Normally my writing hours are from four to six-thirty or so.

I was not completely dressed when my husband sent me a picture of a newborn calf.

 

Okay, so I can tell from that pic that 1) We had a newborn. 2) It’s a bull. 3) It’s up in the pasture field by the feeder, cold and wet and muddy. What you can’t tell from the pic is that it was drizzling and close to freezing, and the calf was shivering.

So, yeah. I had just put clean clothes on, but I knew they weren’t going to stay that way for long.

First, we went over and bedded the barnyard – the part that’s covered. We had a calf that’s sick and two more cows that we’re expecting to calve any day, so we checked them out while we were there.

Also, my daughter-in-law came over with some scraps for our pig.

Now, I know I’ve not talked much about our hog. He’s a friendly fellow, and he enjoys being petted. However, he also, apparently, enjoys eating fingers, and the first time I petted him, he tried to eat mine. This shouldn’t have surprised me, but the pig snapped its head around and had the ring and middle fingers of my left hand clenched between it’s teeth before I could jerk my hand back. I took umbrage at that breech of trust, balled my right fist up, and hooked a hard right on the left side of his snout, just below his eye.

He let go of my fingers and they healed up just fine. I don’t get angry too often, and I wasn’t angry then, but I do have a tendency to hold grudges, I guess.

So, I don’t pet the pig, although sometimes I do go over to his pen, lean against the gate and say, (in a very cheerful and happy tone – because, hey, I don’t want to be bitter) “What’s shakin’ bacon?”

Also, I don’t usually say this to males, but I will sometimes tell him he has some fine looking hams on the backside, too. Just saying.

I guess the point of that story is Jessie gets a little testy when someone tries to eat her fingers.

Anyway, my husband thought he’d call the cows down from the hill and put a bale of hay in the feeder on the bottom side and that would draw the new mama down.

I knew it wouldn’t, but I saw an opportunity to go eat breakfast, so I encouraged him in his endeavor, and took off for the house. Except…

He reminded me that we had a meeting with our accountant later in the morning and he’d (finally) gotten the numbers I needed to finish the P&L and they were on his desk.

So, breakfast was a nice idea, but it didn’t happen quite yet, because I stopped in the office and started working on accounting.

The nice thing about this was I knew I didn’t have to go to the accountant meeting, since Julia had plans with a friend for the day and I was driving her to town.

btw, Julia can drive, and has her license, but she has depth perception issues as well as some visual processing problems, which made homeschooling an interesting challenge for me and an exercise in frustration and perseverance for her.

She can see now, looking back, that those struggles shaped her for the better, but there were some hard years in there.

Anyway, I answered some emails and messages while I was waiting for our computer, which was running slow (because who goes fast that early in the morning, right?) and I could see the cows walking across the hill and down to the barn, although I didn’t see our new mama.

She never walked by, the computer never ran faster and I decided my time would be better spent foraging for breakfast than answering emails, when my husband texted me and asked if I was ready to go get the calf.

Now, it is probably a thousand (muddy, and in some places, deep muddy) yards from where the calf and cow were to our barn. It’s mostly down hill, but when it’s muddy, sometimes that’s a bad thing. And often times newborn calves don’t walk well and need carried.

Anyway, I texted him back that I needed to put my boots and coat on, then I’d be out. One minute. What I left out of the text (for brevity’s sake) was that I was also going to eat breakfast first, too. ? (I know, how does he put up with me, right?)

So, anyway, I was almost to the refrigerator when I saw he was already up on the hill. I knew my butt was going to be in trouble if I didn’t get up there with him, so I open the door and yelled up that I’d be there in a minute (hoping that he’d not notice that I’d already told him one minute ten minutes ago). Somehow that morphed into an argument about how we were going to get the calf down (we were only shouting because we were so far apart).

He wanted to take it down through the pasture (and mud) and I wanted to take it around out of the pasture where there was no mud because I just KNEW we were going to end up carrying it, and where my husband is like a mountain goat and also NEVER gets dirty, I’m basically a klutz and figured I was going to end up on my butt in the mud.

I lost the argument, but I did decide to grab my phone (because I wanted to have great baby calf pics to show you all). Normally I do not take my phone with me to the barn. I think all of us have dropped our phones in the water trough at least once, and some of us (the slow learners, I guess) have done it multiple times.

Anyway, I shoved my phone in my back pocket, put the coat and boots on (again) and hopped over the fence. (Okay, I climbed over the fence, but hopped sounded so much better. : )

This was one of the many times I was wrong because the calf actually did walk the whole way to the barn by itself and I didn’t fall once. It took a while though, because newborns don’t walk fast and the mama didn’t want to go where we wanted her. Finally, after zigzagging around and trudging through the mud, we got them down, under roof and had the gate shut. Perfect time to take a cute calf pic. So, I reach in my back pocket for my phone…but it was gone.

Gotta laugh, right?

So, by this time, the hubs is late for his accounting appointment, I’m not going to have Julia’s friend picked up on time, one of our boys is waiting for us because there was a problem at the (boy’s) chicken barn and our ex-bad boy truck driver is standing in the barnyard with a delivery (and he’s just cooing for all he’s worth over the calf – he’s never seen anything like it)

So, my youngest daughter goes looking for my phone (still laughing over that; this is why there are NO CUTE CALF PICTURES), I throw the numbers in the computer, but can’t get it to print, so I use the hub’s phone to take a pic of the screen and print THAT, then run my daughter to town (never did get breakfast), come home, cook lunch (hot sausage sandwiches with peppers and onions) while I have my laptop on the counter trying to finish the stuff I had to do for the church, and also my phone (which my daughter found) because I have emails and messages to answer still, and I’m almost finished when my husband texts me:  You coming?

Me:  Yes

I have no idea where he’s going.

Okay, so I might take some flack for this, but I try to make my default answer to my husband a “yes.”

Anyway, I finished up the church stuff, delay the emails, got my daughter to finish lunch, and found out that we had a driver who was sick, so I was riding with my hubs to get feed. (On that trip I also ended up looking up some paperwork, emailing it, figuring out what to do about the issues brought up at the accounting meeting and grabbing some 1099s and basically doing my mobile secretary job.) I got home just in time to switch the laundry, put a basket away, clean the kitchen, empty the trash, and take my youngest daughter to pick up a friend who is staying here through Monday. I got home and worked on this newsletter for a half an hour until it was time to go pick up Julia. When we got back, she had a package to open, which kind of took a while, then the hubs wanted me to go over and check the calf and the other cows that are going to freshen, and we also had a goat that was kidding. We didn’t get there in time, and the second baby came out with the placenta wrapped around its head and suffocated. ? My daughter and her friend decided they were going to sleep in the goat barn, so I helped a little with that and told them to please come down if they felt like they were going to freeze to death. (Since I didn’t want to have any awkward conversations with her parents about bodies and funerals, not to mention, they probably wouldn’t let her stay over again.) At this point it’s after ten. I never did get breakfast, and I think I’m just going to put that on my list of things to do tomorrow. : )

I think, when I started this, I was answering the question, when do you find time to write…I don’t know, honestly. Hopefully God doesn’t let me sleep in tomorrow.

 

Thanks so much for spending time with me today!

We did get some rain after a long summer of none, so things are greening up. It also made things a little slick, and I couldn’t get the hay truck out of the bottom pasture after I took bales down to the cows, so I left it there.

When Watson called to see how his cows were doing, I mentioned the bald tires (because it’s the truck, not me, right? LOL) and the rain and the fact that it might be still sitting in the pasture. (I walked home, just for the record, too.)

He said, “Just get in the truck, back it up along the creek, put it in fourth, and floorboard it. If you get a good enough run, it’ll go up the hill, no matter how muddy it is. Don’t cut the corner so fast you roll the truck over.”

I heard, “Climb the Empire State Building and jump off it.”

So, anyway, I decided if he wanted his (dumb, old) truck out of there, I would do it my way. (I actually had to get it out because the cows were getting hungry, and 16 is in that herd, and if they get out, she’s coming for me.)

Okay, I decided I really didn’t want to die, and I kinda feel like I’m going to if that old truck goes any faster than about 5 mph (I’ll go 10 if it’s empty and going uphill) just because the brakes aren’t the best and the steering is hard, and I’m always watching for snakes to crawl out of holes (and there are a lot of holes, just saying). (Have I mentioned the copperheads around here?)

I don’t want to be going so fast I can’t jump out.

Anyway, I have my youngest daughter get behind me and push me out with the tractor.

Julia was supposed to be standing by with her usual job, but she was busy taking pics, I guess.

It was okay, though, because it went off without a hitch. Pie did a great job, and no one died. (That reminds me. We had a cousin staying here for a while. She and Pie are the same age and have been best friends since birth. I think she had a really good time. At least she called her mom to ask to have her stay extended three different times. For some reason, she didn’t mind us putting her to work, the poison oak that swelled her eye shut didn’t seem to bother her—I let them eat ice cream and watch TV, which might have had something to do with it—and the last night she was here, they were swimming in the water trough until almost eleven. When she left, she gave Pie a hug and said, “I’ll miss you. Please don’t die while I’m gone.” IDK if that’s a normal farewell or if my family is just weird. I’m leaning toward the second.)

Actually, I know we’re weird! What about you? What makes your family weird? : )

This spring, Jules and I were checking on the cows, and we came at just the right time to see Auggie be born.

He came out the way he was supposed to—with nose lying on front feet first—but his mom was standing up. Now, this isn’t too uncommon, but I’ve not seen it much, honestly. Usually, the cow lies down and has her baby that way.

Still, Julia and I stood back and watched this little guy slip into the world and land with a thump on his nose.

We weren’t too far away, and we could tell he was okay—he was moving and breathing—but I was alarmed when I saw his face. My first thought was that he’d broken his jaw when he landed on his head.

After getting a little closer and examining him (not touching him, because, you know, mama was kind of protective), I realized that Auggie had a cleft palate.

Maybe you’ve seen or heard of this in children before, as I have, but I’ve never seen it in a calf. He has the top of his nose, but the bottom of his nostrils are missing. His mouth just closes on his nose, which is kind of flat. There’s really nothing to hold his tongue in.

I never said anything to anyone online, because I honestly wasn’t sure if he’d live. I didn’t think he’d be able to suck. Often with a severe cleft palate, there’s a hole in the roof of the mouth and normal breathing and swallowing is hard if not impossible.

Auggie’s cleft palate is pretty severe.

I hate it when I tell a story about one of our animals and they end up not making it. So, I waited.

I have to hand it to Auggie’s mom. She’s a sweetheart, and she stood patiently while Auggie nosed around, fumbling and clumsy, as he tried to learn to eat.

I never talked about the calf I killed (on accident), and I guess I don’t want to do that now, but Auggie was born this spring about that time. Let’s just say it hadn’t been a great week for me. Seeing Auggie’s mom patiently stand still while Auggie taught himself to eat was such a joy.

And he did it. He ate.

We were told he might be able to suck, but he probably wouldn’t be able to chew grain or grass.

Well, I can report to you today that he’s been eating grass for several months (and we don’t feed grain), and he’s not only surviving but thriving.

He’s one of our favs. : )

The girls had just watched the movie Wonder, and that’s where he got his name.

Augge is special to us, partly because we were there from the beginning. My absolute favorite part of farming is watching animals be born.

 

Have you ever seen an animal be born?