Sara's House

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Lessons Learned

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It took me awhile to decide on a title for this blog today.  Maybe it is because my brain is a little foggy due to lack of sleep or maybe because it could have been titled a lot of things:  Bulls & Prayers, Thank God for Father-in-Laws and Great Grandmas, Prayin’ for Good Behavior, etc.

I decided on Lessons Learned because I doubt I’ll make this mistake again and I’m sure my husband is happy to hear that!

So, yesterday was our four year anniversary and Kevin had to head to Des Moines for meetings, so I got to do chores.  Happy anniversary to me!  Chores haven’t been too hard recently, it’s just a few buckets of feed to the bulls and heifers that are right by our barn out back.  But now we are getting into calving season.  We should start calving any minute and the heifers are first, so they need to be checked at least three times a day.  (Heifers are female cows that haven’t had a calf yet, so they don’t always know what to do and may require some assistance.)

The picture below is my heifer check list.  Morning, noon and night I have to go out and find these five heifers.  The letters and numbers on the left side of my paper are on the tags of the heifers that I have to find in the midst of about 50 cows and one bull.  Those letters and numbers actually do mean something.  The ones that I am familiar with are Y12133 That means that it is a yellow tag, that heifer was the 12th one to be born that year and her momma’s tag was 133.  Y5Y49 means yellow tag, 5th one to be born that year and her momma’s tag was yellow 49.  And so on and so forth.

My to-do list.

So, when we check the heifers and cows to see if they are getting close we are watching for their bags to start filling with milk and if they are off by themselves somewhere.  They like to have some privacy when they are giving birth.  I don’t blame them!  As you can see from the picture below they were all together laying in the sun and munching on some hay.
Enjoying the sunny, 40 degree day!  Perfect for calving, but
most of them will probably wait for the next snow storm.
That’s usually when they go into labor,
when the snow and temperatures start falling!

Here is one of the heifers that I was suppose to find.  Took me awhile to find her since she had her head in the hay ring and I couldn’t see her ear tag.

Heifer Y12133 with the white star on her forehead.

Here’s Doug the bull.  He’s in with the cows right now living the life.  Well, actually all the cows that he is with are pregnant, so he’s just hanging out with them for the time being, since he completed his mission.

Doug
Doug hanging out in the straw with some of his lady friends.

Now this is where my story gets interesting.  When I went out and did chores last night, I checked the heifers first and then I filled buckets of grain to give to the bulls and heifers by the barn.  I noticed that Kevin hadn’t opened this one gate so the four bulls that are together could get over to where I like to feed them.  I personally don’t like to walk into the pen with four huge bulls.  They are pretty tame, but if it’s muddy out, my boots like to get stuck and I just don’t really want to get knocked over and stepped on by one of them.  So I feed them over the fence.  Well, since Kevin forgot to open the gate I crawled over the fence and opened it myself.  I feed them and then went on my merry way.

The four bulls that I feed grain to morning and night.

That was around 6pm.  At 11pm Kevin called to say good night and I mentioned to him that I opened the gate for the bulls to get into the pen that I like to feed them in.  And he asked me if I shut the other gate.  
*Pause*  “Uh, what other gate?”
He said, “The other gate so that they can’t get in with Doug and the 50 cows back behind the barn.”  
*Pause*  “Uh, nope….”
After we had a little discussion about who’s fault it was, I bundled up and went out to see how everyone was doing.  If you’ve ever been around bulls, they don’t like when a new one joins the group.  They are “bullies”.  Even though Doug is bigger than the other four, when it’s four against one bad things could happen.  They are such strong animals that they could bust through anything if they really wanted too. 
When I went out to check to see if anything major had happened in the past four and a half hours I found Doug by himself and he seemed ok.  Kevin then told me that we’d just have to leave them until morning and hope that they behave themselves until his dad could come up and help me get them back to the correct pens.
So I headed back to the house and prayed to God that they all just slept peacefully throughout the night.  As I crawled into bed, I kept envisioning fights breaking out during the night and cows running all over the countryside.  And when I wasn’t awake thinking that, I was asleep dreaming that.  At one point during the night I was awoken by a noise.  When I realized that it was just our ice maker I laid back down and tried to go back to sleep.  6 am rolled around and I went outside to assess the damages that I had envisioned all night long.  When I got out there, Doug was in a pen all by himself (the pen that the other four bulls should have been in) so I quickly shut him in.  
Luckily we live right next door to Kevin’s grandma and she was able to come over and watch HD while Kevin’s dad, Greg, and I righted my wrong from the night before.  Luckily the bulls are all used to being fed grain, so once they saw us with a bucket of it, they walked over to the bunk and we were able to shut them in without any issues.  About 15 minutes later everyone was back to where they were suppose to be, all the correct gates were opened and closed and everyone was happy.  
I thanked Greg numerous times for coming up and helping me and he said, “Don’t worry, we’ve all done it before!”  
So, as you can see this post could have been titled “Bulls & Prayers,” “Thank God for Father-in-Laws and Great Grandmas,” “Prayin’ for Good Behavior,” or “Lessons Learned.”  Always double-check to make sure gates are closed if you open one!!!  Now hopefully tonight I will get some peaceful sleep!  

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