Yellow

Raise your hand if you are familiar with the term "calf-scours". 

Now raise it even higher if you know what it smells like!  YUK!!

 

If you didn't get to raise your hand, prepare to be enlightened.  Scours is basically diarrhea in baby calves - NOT A GOOD SITUATION - EVER!  And it smells even worse than it sounds...can make a grown farmer cry when coming into contact with the stuff.  And it has a lovely drab yellow tone. And it's the exact color this house was painted when I moved in after we got married.

 

The poor lady who chose the color, painted every out building the same golden hew - even the barbed wire fence.  God bless her soul.

 

Needless to say, for the first 13 years of our relationship I had banned from our home and yard anything that looked like it might be YELLOW.  However, for our wedding the roses were yellow....hmmm. 

 

But now I've found a love for the color.  Check out the dresser.

 

Here's the ugly pic from my dumb phone of the $10 chest-

 

Finished.

Painted with a bright yellow paint...I mean BRIGHT!

Sanded.

Waxed with a Jacobean-colored furniture wax.

New handles.

Took the brassy things off the middle of the drawers.

{Yes, I saved them!}

 

Looks good with the hollyhocks.

Looks even better in our dark blue bedroom. 

 

Yellow's not so bad.

Becky

Working Cattle

It's been a while since I've been inspired to share anything on this forum.  Then many wonderful and surprisingly entertaining thoughts/ideas popped into my head.  The first of these was a photo journal of our family "working" a pen of cattle.  Ya don't just see that everyday...or do you? 

It was then that I chose to check in on my Bestie in Nebraska to see what she had been talking about...you guessed, didn't you?  Working THEIR calves!  Ugh.  I thought I had an original idea.  Not sa much.

I will give J. credit for being first but I have to share our side of the coin since I edited all of those stinkin' pictures.

Here we go-

 Prop open the gate to desired pen of cattle in a mechanical engineering kinda way...

...with a stick.

Hide behind the tractor until they start to come out of the pen.

Wait for the cattle to come out of their pen.

The arrow points to where the photographer (me) was... then they needed my professional help to chase the rest of 'em out.

Now it's time to get these boys moving in the same direction towards the alley and working chutes {up between those two silos, in other words}.  I often times find myself talking to them like Babe talked to the ewes, "Now, if you fine gentleman would kindly walk up the alley in an orderly fashion, I would be forever grateful."  This dialogue is happening in my head.  My fellow cowboys would look at me with disgust if I actually said it out loud.  That's ok.  The cattle KNOW ME.

They are in the alley ready for their tiny little shot to keep them healthy, make them strong, and most importantly, TASTE GOOD. 

 That was cold.

Keep in mind, they haven't been fed yet and it's almost 9:00am. 

Most of them are as pissed off as #1088 here. 

 "They move better if they are hungry."  Tell him that when you're down in the alley with all 1100# of him.  Oh no. Wait.  It's ME that's down in the alley with him.

Oh look...the princesses have arrived...apparently, there was a uniform today.

AND we mustn't forget the basketball.

Pregame talk with Dad.

Thoughts here:

a. No, he didn't go to the "Final Four".  We shop at Goodwill.

b. The kid with the stick has no idea what his dad is saying at this point.

c. The ladies are thinking about doughnuts and how much longer 'til we can go make sumthin' outta duct tape.

Getting the job done.

Fast forward 90 minutes.  Done.  Cattle are back in their pen eating their breakfast. 

Another Saturday morning.

The next three photos are what you get when you hand the 6 year old the camera when you are busy and say, "Put this in the pick-up for me."

Happy trails-

Becky

Opie

It's calving season - my favorite time of the year. 

Some years can be extremely difficult - mostly weather related. Others are as smooth as chocolate pudding and entice you to buy MORE cows for next year!  This is one of those years. 

 Thank Goodness.

However, when Dad comes in and says we had twins, it isn't said with enthusiasm but with some disdain.  One would think that, hellooo, you get TWO calves.  Isn't that better than one?  Not really.  We usually take the weakest of the two away from mama so that she can raise

ONE BIG STRONG HEALTHY BEEF WAGON

and we keep junior as a "bottle calf" until we can find him a new mama.

Here's the only "weakest one" we've had this year (so far).

Opie...

Just born...kids are drying him off and I'm trying to get him to stand up on his own. 

 He weighed in around 80 pounds.  Hard on this chick's back.

Me covered in birthing goo. 

 I didn't even touch my own babies until they'd had a bath. 

Kidding.

The reason I don't get manicures.

My sister calls my hands "man hands".  It took a lot for me to show you these meat hooks.

After he sucked, he was sent to the nursery pen for some toddler TLC.  Works every time. 

Keeps the toddler busy, too.  Win, win.

He gets three of these everyday for awhile.

Then he becomes a playmate for some...acting like the family dog at times...well, except for the fact that this dog likes to suck on everything. 

 NEVER, EVER, EVER wear clean clothes when feeding a bottle calf.

A neighbor lady once told me that no matter how hard we try, "when us farm women go to town we're always gonna have s*#t on us somewhere".  True story.

Opie.

ahhh...farmlife.

Becky