Saturday, May 28, 2011

We had to put her down.

Well, I am sad to say that we had to put our cow down. She was just getting worse and worse. I felt so bad for her. I watched to vet put her down. I know it was best for her, but it just seems so wrong to take a life, under any circumstances. We really did all we could for her. For 6 days we babied her and gave her as much attention as we could to get her better. We still have no clue what was wrong with her. We know her potassium was very low, but every other test came back fine. Her baby (twin B, lovingly named "Goofy" by the kids) is still here and doing ok. She will probably be here for quite a while. I want to keep a close eye on her.

Julie

Thursday, May 26, 2011

Cow update and a few recent pics....

Well, our mama White Park is still looking very bad. She is barely eating now and I wouldn't be surprised if we lose her today. I hate that. Here is a picture taken of one of our White Parks a week or so ago. I can't quite read the ear tag, but it may even be the one right now that is sick. The are such beasts and very cool.



This is a sweet picture of my Uncle John and Asher taken on Easter.



Meet Misti. She is our new milking cow (hopefully). We plan to breed her soon for an early spring calf. We have a lot of work to do between then and now though. She is super nice and tame, but she is not halter trained and can get real feisty when trying to make her move. She will follow you for some sweet feed though! I think she's pretty.




This is Anna's birthday cake. She wanted chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. Hence the brown dress!




Anna and her bud Katelyn at one of her party's.




Anna had a little slumber party after her birthday shindig. Here the girls are eating their donut breakfast.




Our last gymnastics for the year was last week. I was sure to bring my camera. I should have brought Ryan's camera though. Mine was too little to get a great picture.


Anna and the beam.




Maddie on the big beam.





Gee and his dismount. Graceful, eh?




I need to finish planting my garden. I am almost done, but the rain is seriously affecting my ability to put things in the ground. I think I will wait until this weekend to get the rest in. Right now I have two types of potatoes in, about 5 types of tomatoes, beets, onions (2 types) and peppers (3 types). I also planted about 10 more strawberry plants in my strawberry beds about 2 weeks ago. We are already getting strawberries. I still need to get my beans, sweet potatoes, cucumbers and squash in. Plus the kids need to get their garden's in.


Today will be busy. We are meeting the vet over at the in laws to check on our down cow and to vaccinate the rest of the cows. We will also ear tag our calves and pull some tail hairs to send away for a couple tests. It should be interesting. We only have 3 cows and 3 calves to do, but we have like 20 other cows that need done. I also need to get to Walmart today and try to plant the bushes in the front yard. I am also trying to get some baking/cooking done for our vacation next Saturday. I think we are going to be just plain crazy busy until we leave in 9 days. That vacation will be well needed.


Julie



Monday, May 23, 2011

Stink. Major cow trouble.

We had a super busy weekend. Last Thursday the cow we bought about a month ago to be our future milker had to have an abcess drained. We had noticed a large lump and it just wouldn't go away. The vet drained it (extremely icky) and packed it with iodine laced gauze. We brought Misti (our milker's name) over here to keep her out of the mud and to be able to care for the wound. So, she joined Sparky behind our chicken coop. Misit is a beautiful and tame Dexter cow (will get a pic today), but she is not halter trained (something we will do once she is here full time). So getting her from the trailer to the pen ended up being a one hour chase around our property (she only had like 40 feet she had to walk). Not fun. She is doing very well though and really, I like having her here, even if it isn't full time yet.

So Misti was kind of a pain, but our real trouble started last Friday. Ryan met the kids and I at the park to celebrate Asher's birthday. Around 3:00 we were on our way home when my father in law called to tell us that one of our White Parks was down. Not good. Long story short, she is still down. It took a bulldozer to get her moved to a pen. We were wading in no lie 6 to 10 inches of mud (thank you unending rain). She is still alive but pretty bad. She is eating and drinking however and the vet cannot say what her issue is because all her vital signs were good. It seems strange to us. She is an expensive cow and so we are not willing to just let her die, but at the same time we can't make her more expensive by adding vet bills and treatments that may not even work. Very tricky. While I am not attached per se to this cow, I certainly feel bad for her and do not want her to die.

Another issue with having this cow down is her calf. All of our 4 cows have calves. This cow happens to be Sparky's mom (or bottle fed calf). So with her being down, it leaves her calf (Sparky's twin) alone. Now I have been impressed with how well the 4 White Parks tend to take care of one another. We have even see cows nursing off mama's that weren't their own. After talking to the vet we decided to take Sparky's twin here with us (we left her with mama in the pen one night, but mama is not milking and it was pointless). The vet told us that mama had very little milk left anyways. So Goofy (the kids named her) is here and isnt reall happy about it. She is like a loose cannon, although she seems to like being with Misti and Sparky back in the pen. She will not eat any milk replacer (which is concerning) but will eat some hay. She is very scrawny. We have a call into the vet and I plan to ask her about mama and the calf.

So yeppers, a busy weekend. Every spare minute that was not spent on the cows was spent building fences for the cows (both here and at the in laws). You know though, I don't mind spending our time like that. It feels purposeful to me and we get to do it together as a family.

Oh, FYI, our "farm" now has a name. When Misti's registration was transferred to us the guy we bought her from needed our farm name. That got us thinking and after going over many options, we decided on "The Familia Bendecida Farm." It means "Blessed Family" in Spanish. It is kind of cool because Jorge (Gideon's foster brother) helped us with the translation through e-mail. He is such a neat kid!

Julie

Friday, May 20, 2011

My baby is 2!

My baby is two today! I love this little man more than I can say. Asher is funny, inquisitive, smart and tender-hearted. He is certainly the baby of the family and is treated as such. He is very adored. Can you see why???



How can you not love this face?

Here is the birthday cake we made him for one of his birthday celebrations. Yes, I know Mickey looks a little off. My first one free-handed. Asher liked it though. He LOVES Mickey Mouse.




Asher with his new truck from MaMa and PaPa.



Asher's birthday balloon. I got it for Asher at Walmart last night.



We are going to meet daddy at the park today for a little party with just our little family. I love getting special time with the kiddos on their actual birthday. Daddy is leaving work early and I am making a strawberry pie that Gee helped me pick out. It is actually suppose to be dry today. Yeah!!



I love you so very much little man and so does daddy, Weeeahh (must say it in a sing-song kind of way), Gogie, Addie, Nnna and Gee. You are the best!!

Julie

PS My laptop hard drive has been replaced. Yeah! I have lots of pictures to catch up on.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

New hard drive coming

So my dear husband finished my interactions with HP tech support and my new hard drive is on the way. I have no clue why a new computer already needs a new hard drive...... A little frustrating. Oh well, I am just glad to be closer to full computer capacity.

Life around here is good. I am not feeling too hot today, but I am optimistic that tomorrow will be better. Ryan and I did do a little work on our fences today. They are getting much closer to being done. I am so ready to have them finished, but it is a very long process. They look great though. Also, I really want to get our new milking cow here. She is low man on the totem pole over at our in laws farm, plus she has a problem with her knee. I want to be able to more closely monitor that. Sparky is seriously outgrowing her small pen behind the coop. we let her out in the yard on Friday and she just ran and ran. Oh, and one of our little (black) White Park calves is looking rough. She is very thin and doesn't appear to be connected to her mama anymore. We might bring her over here for a while until she fattens up a bit.

Our barn has made tremendous progress this past week. It was the first time in over 3 weeks that we had anyone even here working. If they keep at this, I think they will be done in another week or so. We still have a lot to do before the barn is ready (like staws and gravel, eventually a loft).

Leah is heading to Chicago this week for a class trip. She is so excited. I am a little concerned for her although I am sure it will be fine. I am just glad it is only for a few days.

Well, there's my small little update. Tons of pictures will follow soon!

Julie

Saturday, May 7, 2011

Sweet Little Chickies!

So our little eggs hatched on thursday. 11 out of the 14 eggs we put in the incunator hatched. That is really a very good hatch rate. The other 3 eggs are still in there, but I will probably get rid of them tomorrow. My very curious side wants to crack them open and do an "eggtopsy" of sorts and see why they did hatch. Part of me thinks I would get totally grossed out. Hmmmm, I will have to think on that a bit...... The 11 we have though are adorable!

Happy Mother's Day to all those great mama's out there! I cannot tell you how blessed I feel to have my beautiful kids and husband. They are more precious to me to anything here on earth and I just praise God for giving me these gifts!!

Julie

Tuesday, May 3, 2011

My computer is gone......so sad.

My laptop is less than a year old and it is gone. I have had trouble with it off and on since I have had it but we assumed some bug had just got to it. We sent it in to the local dude that fixed Colepak's computers and he fixed it. Then it moved to Hotmail issues. If I tried to reply or send a message to someone it shut my computer down. About a week ago my computer completely shut down. I called HP support and was on the phone for an hour and a half with kids needing to eat, etc. Pretty much we needed to shut down my hard drive which would probably cause me to lose all my data, so I told him that I needed to back things up first. That is where we are at. My computer is backed up and I just need to call HP again. I know we are going to have to send the hard drive in and I am dreading calling and being on the phone forever. It is frustrating that a computer that is pretty much soley used for internet piddling and a few pictures is having so much trouble.

Well, we are still living in a swamp. This rain is really making me want to go cuckoo. Our barn has not been touched in over two weeks. My garden plot is so wet I can't even begin to plant in it. The grass seed we've planted is probably rotting. IT IS A MESS.

On one productive note, we have gotten all our fence posts in for our pasture. This is kind of huge. We spent the last two weekends on it. Ryan worked his hiney off and my father in law pitched in tons. I didn't do much until last weekend, but they are all in! Even in the rain. The negative side to this is that there are huge ruts and mud spots now throughout the pasture due to the skidloader being so heavy and sinking into the wet ground. But we knew that would happen and really needed to get that fence in. Can't really wait for the rain to stop or it would never get done..... Now we have to get the wire screwed on and electrified and add the gates. That will probably take another two weekends, but I would much rather be doing that stuff than driving posts (not that I do all that much....).

Animal/Livestock Updates.......

Logan has picked his beef feeder calf and I think we will be getting it in a couple weeks. His name is Monopoly. Ryan went with a friend (a dude that knows way more about this stuff than we do) and picked him out. I think Logan is pretty excited about him. Sparky needs a buddy for sure!

Sparky is doing great. She is getting big! She is still taking the bottle a lot and she needs to be switching over to feed/hay more. I am not sure how to get her to do that. Time for more internet research I guess. She downs her bottles these days and she nudges so hard it hurts. Last night she busted Logan's lip pretty bad when she nudged him.

We picked up our milker cow last week. She is so pretty and friendly. Really, she is super cool. I cannot wait to get her here in our barn/pasture. She is a registered Dexter. They are a pretty interesting breed. They are naturally smaller than a normal milking cow and I think she will be much easier to handle, come time to milk her. She will not be milked for quite a while though because she isn't even pregnant yet. We are working on that. We are hoping she will calf next spring and will have milk all next summer/fall.

The chickens are, well, doing what chickens do. Our original layers are giving us about 8 to 12 eggs a day right now, which is pretty good. Our new layer chicks are in an awkward stage where their feathers are half in and half not, they look pretty funny. Their colors are super pretty though and I am happy with my hen choices. Leah's fair silkies are gorgeous. Really pretty birds. I am interested to see how they show this year. The meat birds are 7 weeks today. You are suppose to butcher between 7 and 8 weeks. They are looking so healthy though, I want to wait as long as I can. Maybe the end of next week?

Our little eggs in our incubator are on day 21. They are suppose to start hatching today. We have been candling the eggs to check on their development and it appears that all 14 were alive and looking well (to my untrained eye). They were all moving inside the egg as of 3 days ago. On day 18 the chicks go in to "lockdown." You don't open the incubator, you don't turn the eggs any more, etc. So, we are just waiting to see when and I guess "if" they hatch. It would be a bummer at this point to get this far and loose them.

Ok, so there is life around these parts I guess. I would love to post some pictures, but until my laptop is fixed, that is not happening.

Julie

Psalms 10:14, 17-18

"You are the helper of the fatherless.  LORD, You have heard the desire of the humble; You will prepare their heart; You will cause Your ear to hear, To do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed, That the man of the earth may oppress no more."