Our Angel is ONE YEAR OLD today!

[willowgirl]

Then:

Now:

Yes she is muddy; it rained like heck here Saturday!

The neighbor's herd came over to wish her a happy birthday:

She is still a daddy's girl for sure!

[Woodpecker]

And still in love with daddy😍 she’s so darn cute!!!!

[mzgarden]

Awwwww, so cute.

[Melissa]

What a difference a year makes!

[willowgirl]

Thanks you guys!

She has been such a joy.

[dw]

TOO Cute!!!

[allenw]

You've done good with her.

[willowgirl]

Thanks! Growing like a weed, she is. I swear she shot up some since that picture was taken ...

[countrymom22]

As cute as she was as a calf, she turned into a gorgeous heifer! Gotta love those spots! And the neighbor's herd are quite attractive too. Love the horns!

[willowgirl]

Yeah, the longhorns are pretty impressive! They come over to visit a lot, lol.

[willowgirl]

Angel is getting big! So big, in fact ...

[mogal]

I've heard of leather upholstered furniture but don't you think that's a bit much?

How funny!

Was she dehorned or did she just grow some little scur deals where Numb is holding her head?

[willowgirl]

We WISH we had dehorned her! Instead, she managed to snap off BOTH her horn caps, a couple months apart, probably by raking them across the chain link gate.

I hadn't wanted to dehorn her as a baby because I figured she had already been through so much trauma due to the broken leg. Boy did I regret that when we had to deal with bloody horn stumps, blargh.

So now she has two little scurs, which give her a devilish look, lol. Luckily they are not ugly scurs; more like stumpy little horns with which she pokes Daddy when he's cleaning out her shed.

The above pic was taken right after he finished trimming her hooves. He taught her to tolerate having her feet messed with when she was a baby, so now when he has to trim her, he just pulls a foot out from under her and goes to work on it. She doesn't even miss a beat chewing her cud!

[Woodpecker]

Never knew cows could be so darn sweet and in a way, with Numb anyway, cuddly

[willowgirl]

Oh they all adore Numb, lol.

He is quite the ladies' man ...

[allenw]

You've done good with her.

[mogal]

Willowgirl said:

"He taught her to tolerate having her feet messed with when she was a baby, so now when he has to trim her, he just pulls a foot out from under her and goes to work on it. She doesn't even miss a beat chewing her cud!"


I guess the old saying "As the twig is bent, so grows the tree" applies to critters as well. No, I don't GUESS. I know.

[oldone]

About time for some pictures & stories. We want more!!

[oldone]

Still waiting on pictures. PLEASE

[oldone]

Did something happen to Willowgirl?

[Melissa]

oldone, She hasn't checked in for a while. She posts on another board maybe someone will let her know you have been asking about her!

[oldone]

Thank you

[willowgirl]

We are alive and well! Just having a crazy time here. Numb's mom passed away after a long illness right after Thanksgiving, then in December my boss and his wife decided to sell the cows and retire. We bought four more cows who weren't going to make the cut in the new herd. One, Jewel, calved last month with a bull (now steer) calf, while another, Annabelle -- our Marianne's granddaughter -- slipped on the ice, did the splits and had to be euthanized. We also lost Willa, one of our newer rescues, who died unexpectedly for no apparent reason. She hadn't been 'off' and was fat and sassy like the rest of the herd, then BOOM! Have no idea what happened to her, other than she was an older cow, and sometimes these things happen.

Everyone else is alive and well. We have 16 cows now, counting the calf!

I have been working dayshift cleaning one school, subbing as a night custodian at another, putting up real estate signs in my spare time and cleaning houses on weekends! It looks like I'm on track to eventually get a full-time union job at the second school ... keep your fingers crossed for me!

I'll post more pics soon. Here's Juno, our baby!



He's the spittin' image of his daddy, who was the mixed-breed beef bull we used at the dairy for the last year. He's about six weeks old now and fat as a tick, getting all of the milk out of a Holstein cow, lol.

[stickinthemud]

Cute calf! Fingers crossed you get the job.

[Woodpecker]

Prayers for the job willowgirl, I don't cross fingers another adorable calf!!!

[susannah]

Juno's adorable! What a cutie!

My fingers are crossed and I'm wishing you all kinds of good luck on getting the job.

[allenw]

Cute calf.

[mogal]

Mar 24, 2022 18:37:17 GMT allenw said:

Cute calf.

Aren't they all with those big eyes and long eyelashes, sweet inquisitive expressions?

[allenw]

I'm patiently waiting for this years babies to start coming. They're close.

[comfortablynumb]

Annabelle -- our Marianne's granddaughter -- slipped on the ice, did the splits and had to be euthanized. We also lost Willa, one of our newer rescues, who died unexpectedly for no apparent reason.

Ya know, that short statement really doesn't do the nearly month long deal that involved...

So, first off,When Annie fell down, we had to go get hip lifters and the old boss from the dairy. We hitched her up and with an electric winch lifted her up on her feet where she walked into a stall and in about 5 min laid down. She never got up on her own after that, and for 18 days (yup...18 days) with an assortment of ropes pulleys and 2 electric winches, I rolled her over several times a day, and willow and I got her lifted onto her feet ever few days. She did try to stand a couple times, and did manage to remain on her feet, precariously, for a few minutes before gravity took over and she would collapse.... hanging in the air, and we would slowly run the winches backwards to set her down on a pile of straw. Rolling her over often required to actually lift her off the ground and get her legs in the right place. 2 or 3 times a day... for 18 days. She didnt seem to mind the attention, and the room service. She was actually pretty happy to the end.

The day after she fell, when we found Willa that was a whole interesting day in itself.

A bit of a back story...keep in mind I am not nor do I profess to be a farmer or really know much about equipment, I kinda learn on the fly and take my chances...LOL.

Anywho, we bought that nice backhoe, which seemed to be just what one needs to bury a cow when you need to. So we thought. It seems that we did not take the terrain into account. You can't drive up a hill with it and live very long, nor could you park it on one to do any digging. The became disturbingly obvious to us both very fast, when we tried. The deep mud and the rain did not help at all..

So, we drug poor willa to one spot, realized that was not going to work, and then we took a fence down and drug her to another, where we decided to dig her grave.

This is where it got interesting. We did not consider the creek only 50 ft away. Once I got down 3ft I hit a sheet of rock, and a fairly large spring. Oops. Nobody is going in that hole. Then not surprisingly, the 58 yr old hoe started to leak. Ugh. I folded it up and put it back in the parking lot.

While willow took up a pick and shovel, and proceeded to keep making the hole bigger I went off to find a solution. I admit freely, had no clue where to go or who to call but, as luck as it, the people who have the longhorns next door have a huge collection of antique equipment and trucks et al, on 160 acres of... farm. So I called Dave, one of the clan, and told him our problem. He said "yeah you cant bury a cow beside a creek...lol"

He said if we had a place to bury her he and his brother could bring a small track hoe out and do it. I said yea she should be up on the hill but I dunno how youd get her there.

He said... hold our beer.

They arrived in an hour with this tiny little excavator on tracks. I thought these guys are gonna be stuck in 5 min. But no, that thing went thru the slop, filled our badly dug pothole, took the cow up the hill and put her in the ground in about 30 min.

He dig a hole big enough to put a car in with that thing....color me unpressed. And they dressed the spot up so nice, it level and clean again.

Then they offered to come do that anytime we need for the same price. Yah! One less worry.

Pretty involved story for 2 sentences up there quoted. Whew.

So.. when it was Annabelles turn, I called Dave and Tom and they were there in 30 min. I said "Shes down in the barn...you probably cant get in there so I have 100ft synthetic winch rope you can get ahold of her and pull her out to the level"

Dave, who strangely always has a can of beer in his hand, said.... nah. Tom can do it. And Tom drove that thing thru the slop, down into the barn a foot from poor Annie. Again...I'm impressed. She went in a different place up there on the hill but this time we hit rocks... huge rocks bigger than his bucket, but he ripped them all out, and backfilled it in as clean as you please in about....30 min.

Slicker than snot on a proverbial doorknob.

So... out of a real tragedy we did have a few upsides. One, we found a really good farm vet who makes farm calls and seems to actually know what shes doing for a very reasonable rate. We found a neighbor to do our grave digging in any weather on short notice, and they know what they are doing and do it very well. We not only obtained our own set of hip lifters but we learned over 18 days how to be pretty skilled at moving a cow around with 300 feet of rope 2 portable winches, a dozen pulleys and a bunch of other things.

Not to mention Juno got a nice green rubber band on his... Um... nevermind.

Things have been kinda going like that all year. As willow said my mom passed away, not unexpectedly, she had been fighting with heart failure and bad kidneys for several yrs, keeping one step ahead of the grim reaper. She did an impressive job with diet and drugs she know backward and forward. Just this time, when she went in for a round of heart failure problems, they couldn't get the fluid off fast enough, and her kidneys gave out, so they put her on dialysis a few times a day.... which was helping but not making much progress. She got weaker and weaker, till she couldnt feed herself or talk very well. As they were getting ready to do her morning dialysis, she was alert and talking with her Nurse (great guy... cant praise him enough) joking with him and asking about the days schedule. Then he said she simply closed her eyes and poof... she was gone. Kinda took the whole staff by surprise....but I am glad she went quickly and quietly. My grandmother died slowly and painfully from cancer, I think she was really afraid that was her fate as well.

When I got her DC in the mail, on the back signed by her own doctor was her cause of death.... Pneumonia caused by Covid-19.

No.. she didnt have covid, she went in with a neg test and had a neg test the day before she died. She had no coid like symptoms She was not IN the covid ward under quarantine like the people who had covid all were. We were NEVER warned that she had covid.  . So on top of everything else, I found out not only her cheerful old doctor, but the hospital lied.... about what else I wonder. UGH! 

Insert a string of terms and expressions I an forbidden by protocol and decency to post. 

So... that was the end of a decade or more of intensive daily care there. Then came Juno, Annabelle fell down, willa karked, the whole "Oh boy.. we cant actually bury a cow" 4 hour horror show and... there ya go.

Around here one sentence equals a whole chapter of a book. LOL.