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