{One Sunday Afternoon}

Sunday was a pretty busy day, full of trapshooting, checking cows, and other cow related business.

First thing on the list of to do's for Clayton and I to do is to go and check the cows and make sure everything is doing good. After checking the first pen we had to the second pen and what do we find? One of the cows (671) across the creek with her water sack hanging out. Good news, a calf is on the way! Clayton takes a look at her for and decides that we will give her an hour or so before we start to worry about her too much. So, we continue to on and check on the rest of the cows. Not much else is happening besides one of the yellow cows is by herself, but no action as far as we can tell. 

We then head back to the house for breakfast, sausage and waffles, and get ready to go to the Gun Club to shoot our trap for the day.

We get to the Gun Club and sign up to shoot. When our squad is called to shoot, we get on our shooting glasses, put in our ear plugs, and grab our guns. After we are done shooting I go and check the scores and find some super exciting news out! I BEAT CLAYTON! If you ask him he may give you a list of excuses, but the matter of fact is that I beat him by one bird. It is so exciting because I have never ever beat him in the last five years of me trapshooting. After we get done, we quickly get out of there to go and check on cow 671.

We get back from the Gun Club and much to our pleasure the cow has calved! So we go about our day of checking the cows.

Getting up the calves and a way from the feeders, and making sure that everything else is going good. Everything seems to be good, except for the yellow cow is still off to herself and doesn't look like much else is happening.

It is now time to move an additional feeder to one of the other pens. Guess what? Clayton let me drive one of the tractors, not that he really had a choice. With is dad down and out with knee surgery, it was up to me, and I was ready and willing to help!

We then go and check on the yellow cow again, but still nothing has happened. Clayton gives Grandpa Z a call and has him come up to check everything out with us. After we get the yellow cow into the calving shed it is time for Clayton to "feel around" and make sure that everything feel right, it does so we keep her in the pen and leave her alone to do her business. 

After checking on the yellow cow, it is time for a break. We eat lunch and Clayton is back to work, entering all of the calf information onto his computer worksheet, while I work on this blog. 

After our break, it's back to checking. As we are driving up the road it looks like one of the cows may have just calved, or be in the process. We get on the 4-wheeler, check the yellow cow, still nothing, and go and check the cow we think may have just calved and much to our surprise it was the last of the heifers. 

Relieved and happy we head back the house for dinner, chicken cordon bleu. After our bellies were stuffed Clayton and I start to watch AxMen. After about 15 minutes of watching, we decide that we better go and check on the yellow cow again and the new heifer calf. 

We walk in to check on the yellow cow gratefully she had calved, but this was not just any calf. It was a moose, this calf was huge (sorry no pictures)! It looked like it was already a month old.  

We then decide to get back on the 4-wheeler and check on the heifer calf. Unfortunately, the heifer calf had not sucked, and the mom was not interested in the calf. So in the dark we have to round-up the cow and get her into the corral and get the calf and put them both into the calving shed. 

After a bit we get the calf to sucking and all is happy, until we check on the yellow cow again. It does not appear that the calf has gotten up, and it has not eaten either. So after getting the heifer cow out of the milking station we put the yellow cow in and head back for the calf. As we suspected, the calf had not gotten up and walked yet, so we had to make it stand up (which was a bit of a struggle). Finally after about 30 minutes we got he yellow cow and calf happy and eating. We head back to house, AxMen is over and I decide that it is time for me to head back home. 

The rest of the night is pretty self explanatory. I get home, shower, watch tv, and go to bed (nothing exciting there).

Anyways, I just thought that I would share my lovely Sunday afternoon with you all. 

TTFN - Ta Ta For Now,