Death part of farming never easy for me

It’s been a whole year since I started this venture of trying to inform you of what’s going on in the local agriculture world!
I’m not sure if things will be a lot different going into a new year. We only can hope for more money and happy, healthy cows at least.
I started the new year off with a bit of a bummer as I had a cow abort a calf. Not much you can do about this; it was just too early and even if it wasn’t, it would never have survived in this cold weather.
I’m just over a month away from calving and I had planned to keep my cows in the bush until near mid-January, although this always makes you nervous. I start to question whether I should bring them home sooner.
I will try to hold off for a couple of more weeks.
The death part of farming is something I’ve never become good at. I know, I know: “If you’re gonna have livestock, you’re gonna have deadstock!” (taken from our old vet friend, Dr. Cannon).
So, I can only hope that is it for my bad luck for this year!
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I picked up Maddie and Marlee on New Year’s Eve.
Our first stop was McDonald’s for lunch. Whew, it is a ton of work loading and unloading, and dressing and undressing those girls. Then it was tough to keep the “Happy Meal toys” straight.
We eventually re-dressed and reloaded, and were off to the country. Marlee feel asleep about five minutes from my place and unfortunately that was it.
We tried to get her to go back to sleep, but that didn’t happen.
We put on some extra clothes and went out sliding down some of the big snowbanks for the afternoon. We all had fun despite the bitter cold.
Grandma came home from work and took the girls there as I discovered some of my calves were out. It turned out the deer had been tangled up in the gate so the calves had no reason to not be out.
I did get them put back where they belonged.
Since the girls were sleeping at Grandma and Grandpa’s, I was off to celebrate the New Year at the wedding social for Billy Teeple and Alexis LaForest. They picked a great night to have a party and everyone seemed to have a great time.
I waited to see if I was lucky enough to win some prizes, but as usual I didn’t, so off to home I went (how come it is so hard to stay out late and at one time in your life when you can stay up all night and still give ’er the next day?)
Since it was so cold, we decided not to take Marlee out the next day, but we bundled Maddie up and my boyfriend/partner pulled us behind the snowmobile to check the traps.
Maddie was hoping for a marten but instead all we got was a flying squirrel.
It was a long ride but she never complained as we took the time to swing through and check cows, as well. She likes to keep a close eye on a cow named “Canada” that has a large abscess (it looks like she had her wisdom tooth out on one side).
So we checked to see how she looked and then headed back to the warm house, where we had to prepare for our New Year’s meal!
We decided to have seafood, and since my mom was working, we needed to prepare things so we could eat once she was home and my brother and sister–in-law arrived.
Shane and Char were a little late since they had a late night and there was a good hockey game on that Shane couldn’t pull himself away from. The girls were tired when they arrived so we ended up sending them home in not very good moods, but at least they were going home!
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All the best to everyone for 2010!