Amy's Humble Musings

We saved her. Holly the Holstein—it was #2 kid’s turn to name a pet—is alive for now. I’m happy to report that the mostly-dead calf is on pasture. This is good and not the same thing as being put out to pasture. But to fully appreciate this momentous occasion, I have to back up a little bit.

Things often die, break, burst, and explode when Greg is out of town, so I should’ve saw this coming. I spent several days drenching the calf—the tricky process of putting a tube down an animal’s throat and into her stomach and trying not to remember that the vet just aspirated a calf last week and that they pretty much just fall over dead on top of you if you do it wrong. By mid week, the electrolytes weren’t working and the calf was lying on her side, unable to get up.

The decision to pay for an IV (I can’t do everything) was balanced with my ick for dead things. Simply, I didn’t want to drag her out of the barn and bury her, because then I’d have to touch her. When I was a kid with a fish tank of guppies, I had to close my eyes when I flushed a dead fish. I don’t do dead things.

McGregor and I loaded the mostly-dead calf into the van, the van without seats that fold down, because of course, Greg dropped the truck at the airport parking lot. McGregor is not too bright at every occasion, but hear hear, he volunteered to carry the head, so that left me with the other end, the end with diahrrea.

A little arranging of someone’s old socks, a Dora potty book, and a Tupperware of old grapes, and we were able to scrunch her limbs into the van. Squirrrt. Oh yes, I love my life!

On the way to The Cow Hospital, I thought she’d died on me, oh great, but McGregor noted a slight rise in her body cavity. We got there, but the doctor was gone, so we unloaded the 100+ pound-mostly dead cow ourselves. Once again, McGregor lept to the front of the cow, and I got the back end, so I made a mental note about a study on chivalry after algebra this week. It was not the most graceful unloading of a sick patient; she basically just collapsed in a bag of bones on the ground.

Once I dragged her into the barn, I heard a sniffle from my partner-in-crime and firstborn son. Then more sniffles. I reached out, put my arms around him, and held him for a long time, peeking over my shoulder periodically to grimace at the unmoving calf. After some time had passed, I explained that death was just part of farm life.

“Um. I just got hay up my nose when she plopped on the ground.”

Oh.

When Greg returned from his trip, the vet called to let me know that I could pick up the calf. You mean, alive?! So, I sent Greg since I’d done enough, eh? He drove up and a stable boy provided full-service loading of a non-squirting calf for him. He just sat in his vehicle. I must not be living right.

According to the kids, I was quite the hero for saving the calf. That is, until later that day I backed up over their favorite kitten. It wasn’t The Mean Cat, The Scared Cat, or The Cat that Only Shows Up for Food, but rather, The Favorite Kitten who slept in the girls’ room until she got a little stronger and wore dress up clothes.

To say that I made soup out of her would be underplaying it. McGregor sat up and groaned, “Oh noooo! Oh, oh, oh…..,” because of the way she died. I will save that part in the comment section of this post because it’s bad, real bad.

It’s true that I struggle with pride sometimes on a job well done, but it never seems to last very long at all.

Keep your eye on the background.

This is why you should never use mom’s camera for your photo shoot. I might look at the pictures and see that there are baby goats in my rose bushes.

Don’t you know the first rule in this house?

Okay, besides the one that says, “Throw up goes in the toilet.”

“Touch mom’s Dove chocolate and die?” Buzz.

No, I mean the one that says, “Mom’s rosebushes are precious examples of the Glory of God. ….And if you value your life, sacred honor, and fluffy tush, you’ll gallop on the other non-rosebush 100 acres hunting for your lost Silly Bands and goats.” The rules are simple, really.

Speaking of pictures:

The goats are two weeks old and already dumb. [These are goats! I only bought ONE sheep! Now stop it!] If I can raise an animal from the almost-dead this week, I can surely do the reverse and make goat soup.

But I will tell you about the soup I made in the next post. :(

Oh, Little Bottle Calf, it’s time for your bottle!

Oh great. She’s half dead from scours. That’s diarrhea, for you City Slickers.

[No picture.]

I’m just saying that I know why farmers are real buff and toned now. (Not that I’m a farmer.)

I also know why they’re tan, too, since I spent all day outside trying to COAX her to OPEN HER FLIPPING MOUTH.

I prefer the easy way, but Little Miss prefers $38 of pills, shots, and a *used* stomach feeding tube.

For the first time, I wish I didn’t close my eyes and hyperventilate every time I got a shot or else I’d know how to do this.

And now someone new has nightmares about me.

You can learn a lot of things on You Tube. I am just saying.

In those movies, the man with three big-boy helpers didn’t have to TRY FOUR TIMES.

I’m going in on the right side, pointing toward her left, but then she took off down the hill. With me on her back.

Why are there no pictures of that? Because the 8-year-old photographer was laughing and whooping. Let’s try again.

Greg wants to know if the neighbors were home to see all this.

Yes, yes. Me and my white capris are OK. Thanks for asking.

But back to the task at hand where we stick a tube down her stomach without anesthesia and try not to aspirate her.

She’s 100% dead if I don’t try, but I will still feel awful if I fill her lungs. Does that make me a murderer if I kill her before she dies? :(

And then the bag sprung a leak. Oh? What? That only happens to me?

Let’s see, McGregor would you like to plug the hole WITH YOUR LITTLE PINKY FINGER or go for a little ride down a hill and rip off your ear when she bucks you into the barbwire? Like last year.

I also roped and moved a 900 pound cow this morning and led her down the driveway —- with slack in the rope—- but do we have pictures of that? Nooooo….

Dear Baby Bottle Calf…..

….please don’t die on me now.

This is the story about how I got into the sheep business.

In my defense, because even dumb people are entitled to a decent defense, I am still half-blind and the auction room was real smokey.

Too, a lingering cold left me deaf in my right ear this month, and there’s only one consonant difference between maa-aaa and baa-aaa. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

My arms and legs still work, but I re-broke my toe last night on a brass cannon laying in the middle of the floor. (Doesn’t everyone have a brass cannon lying in front the pantry door?) So, I’m just saying, I’ve not got much to work with.

I don’t know what Greg’s excuse is.

Now auctions are decent entertainment. We bought a new fly catcher today, and while that was good for a solid hour’s fun, still nothing beats a good auction. It took awhile, but I finally figured out the auction basics— don’t nod your head while making eye contact, and by golly, DON’T get into a bidding war with an Amish woman over canning jars. Greg just braces himself before I head out, deciding in the end, spending a couple bucks at an auction is cheaper than therapy.

It’s best to buy your animals off a farm, NOT an auction, for many reasons. One small reason is that there’d be a sign saying “goats for sale”, thereby identifying what you might be buying. But seeing as how I was looking for $50 goats to turn over, not $250 fancy kind, the auction is the place of last resort. I’d done barked up every tree in the whole county.

We spent a solid hour selecting the goats we wanted to bid on, making sure their udders were nice and their backs were strong. We watched them for any signs of lethargy and disease. And I eavesdropped on what people were saying. That’s always a good technique.

Before the auction, I’d even read several books on goats, and to shore up on that, ahem, “extensive knowledge”, we even wrestled up a neighbor who works at the auction. He agreed to help us make a good selection. What could go wrong? Tongue-in-cheek, Greg joked beforehand, “Now, you gotta be careful with us. We might come home with a sheep instead of a goat.”

Hahaha. That’s a good one.

So the auction began. Real smart-like, I didn’t bid on the first one of a large lot, because it usually sells higher than the others. I’m a conservative bidder on animals at an auction, because you should never pay top (or middle) dollar for an animal that might end up dead in your barn the next day.

The pace was fast, and the beed-da-ba-beeding was even faster. I haven’t yet paid a hundred dollar bill for a chicken, but I reckon that must be dumb luck after you hear what happened next. I fell out of the bidding early on, and they were sold out from under me one-by-one. Out of the entire lot of nanny goats, I was only able to buy these two:

Heh.

Along with the, ahem, “goats”, we ended up with a bottle calf and a pygmy nanny with babies.

At midnight, Greg and I were walking back from the barn (where we quarantine auction animals), smelling the sweet smell of fresh cut hay and discussing which breed of goat has ears like that… Hmm. We had a flashlight, but it was dark and the moon was small. We tucked our scraggly calf and kids in their new home for the night.

And that’s when Greg noticed our auction receipt, which led to googling Hair Sheep, and was led to a picture of our new, uh, goat.

And that’s when I said, “Remember that guy that poked me about bidding up the price on the sheep he was trying to buy, but I told him, ‘I ain’t buying no sheep’….?”

Yeah, that. I hope God separates the sheep from the goats better than I do.

I’m half-blind. I’m half-deaf. And apparently, I’m half-stupid too.

Greg’s 22nd Atlas launch. The rocket is carrying a communications satellite.

This is our new Guernsey. She is such a little lover. Her name is Izzy. If you know that we call our youngest, “Bizzy” (short for “Elisabeth”), you can imagine how this can get confusing. But since the cow already knows her name and our two-year-old already knows her name, and I’m not retraining either of them, I don’t know how you change all that now.

But they both come running for either name.

Because of her disposition, I plan to use her as our main milker instead of the Jerseys. Since she isn’t bred yet, that’ll be awhile, but it’d be a shame not to milk such a sweet girl. Our Jerseys are like cats, and this Guernsey is like a dog. Izzy comes when you call her and lets you love on her. The Jerseys come when you have the grain bucket, but otherwise, look up and then go back to chewing their cud.

This is Bizzy, and she likes chasing cats. I apparently like herding cats, so we have a bit in common.

This was my garden last year.

This is what happens when you leave your farm and spend your afternoons reading about gardening.

Greg says we meant to do that. It’s our new goat habitat.

All we need to do is locate goats (done!), pay money for goats, haul goats home, set up the fencing for goats (which is different from cow fencing, did you know?), haul water over there for the goats, muck out the barn to refill the raised beds, and voila!–just like that– the basic framework will be in place again. (I love the simple life.)

Seems like a person could knock themselves out before you even got started planting a pumpkin seed. I just said “pumpkin” because I’ve always wanted a pumpkin patch. We had a melon patch last year, but it is not the same thing as a pumpkin patch.

I think this is one of the problems of being a “big picture” thinker. (Another problem is that you have to actually do something, as opposed to just thinking about something.) It’s hard to just do the next thing, but you know, a marathon is just a bunch of little steps put together. I wish I was only tired about my garden, because as usual, I only mean it as a euphemism.

The hay got cut this week, and so it looks more like a farm and less like a jungle around here.

I remember when we first bought the place, we drove around awhile looking for it. We couldn’t find the house because the weeds were blocking it. “Hey, this wasn’t what the picture looked like….”

It’s funny now, but it’s one of those things that isn’t so funny at the time.

Or put another way, can we “see too much into” Providence?

More from The Screwtape Letters, the story of the devils’ conversation on converting the Christian to join them in hell. This is good stuff; don’t skip it:

“Don’t forget to use the ‘Heads I win, tails you lose’ argument. If the thing he prays for doesn’t happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don’t work; if it does happen, he will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and ‘therefore it would have happened anyway,’ and thus a granted prayer becomes just as good a proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective.” — p. 127

In my head, I chalk a lot of things up to circumstance, but in my theology, I affirm that God orders all things since that is what the Bible teaches. (See: a gabillion verses.) I admit, there’s a disconnect there.

But what an interesting thought—how much do I thank God for and how much do I assume, well, “it would have happened anyway”?

On another angle, what if God answers prayer but the answer is No? Now that I’m older, I realize God wasn’t just saving me from the depths of hell, He was sometimes just saving me from myself, so thank God for that, too. When we say “God answered prayer,” usually we actually mean: I’m glad God did what I wanted Him to do.

This is Hamburger, the Holstein. We think he looks like the Devil, but he’s actually really sweet.

Isn’t that the way the Devil is? Does he ever show up in a red costume and a pitchfork with a name tag that says, “Hello, my name is….Lucifer”?

That reminds me of this passage from The Screwtape Letters. Screwtape is a supervisor devil to his nephew, Wormwood, who is learning how to woo a Christian away from God (“the Enemy”):

“Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is His invention, not ours. He made all the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable.” — pp. 41-42

The easiest, slam-dunk example of a good gift that is misused is sex–an awesome gift from God but yet so perverted by evil.

This idea of pleasure is especially interesting and relevant today as many serious Christians deny Christian hedonism, preferring a sort of asceticism that thinks God is impressed with our homemade bread. (If you aren’t convinced this is true, try telling the internet you quit homeschooling and didn’t use 12 coupons at CVS this weekend.) If God gives you the freedom of conscience to eat and enjoy, well then, you should. It’s in the Bible.

There is a difference between suffering for Jesus and suffering for bad theology. I know this because I usually suffer from my own stupidity, not for Jesus. There is a way to know if the burden you’re carrying is from God or from some miscellaneous new teaching you read on the internet: His is yoke is not heavy and doesn’t crush us under its weight. (You also don’t get a free Sham-Wow with three easy payments of $19.99.) Be careful out there, moms. The Devil is never dressed in horns.

God is the giver of all good gifts, including rest and freedom. Have you ever received a gift and then left it on the shelf because it was too nice to use? Use it, girl. We can best thank Him by actually enjoying those gifts. God is glorified in us when we are satisfied in Him.