About 45 days after Prim was born last year, Posey got a.i.ed. That's the normal time. We used Burdette sexed semen on her again, and she settled the first time! We still didn't know if it would be a heifer. There is no guarantee even with sexed semen.
Posey was due on June 24th. The night of the Super Moon, June 23rd, she started discharging and stretching and walking over and over. The continued this behavior on the 24th, too. This time with about double the discharge.
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Last night, June 25th, MawMaw called us about 10:15 and said that she could see the sack peeking out of the back of Posey, and she was standing up.
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With no traffic, we jetted over to their house in about fifteen minutes.
When we got there, the calf was already on the ground and Posey was cleaning it up very aggressively. When we first shined the headlights on them, the calf was lying on its neck twisted very strangely. We figure Posey had the calf while she was standing up, and that's how it landed. It was wiggling its ears and we could hear it breathing, but the position it was lying in was scary. Mom had me jump in and re-position the calf so it was lying normally.
The calf has less white on it than Posey and Prim do, but it's got that cute little white arrow on its forehead like its mom and sis. This calf and Prim are full siblings because we used the same sire, Burdette, on Posey for both pregnancies.
You could still hear it still had fluid when it breathed. It crackled a lot. It coughed stuff up, too. I wiped its nose and mouth to pull out as much of that gunk as possible. I worked on the front end a little while Posey worked on everything else.
Posey was acting different from when she had Prim, so we were very careful to watch and make sure she didn't decide to charge us or throw us against the stock panels. She didn't try anything, but it's always better to be safe than sorry. If a cow charges you and knocks you down, and you don't get out of there, it can beat you to death with its head. We've read about it.
We were just DYING to roll the calf over and "inspect the plumbing." You can't count your heifers until you can count the teats underneath!
We didn't have a name picked out for sure. We had lots of ideas, of course. We decided on the way over that if it turned out to be a bull, we would name him "Por que" which means "WHY?" As in WHY does it have to be a bull?!?!
FINALLY, Posey relaxed a little, and we loved on her a little, and mom was able to grab one of the calf's hind legs and take a peek. Little pink TEATS!!! Yea!!!
I like to think of the one on her leading side as a "C" - like she was monogrammed just for me from God.
Momma and baby were both really worn out. They both needed a rest during the clean up portion of the evening.
We had to put a rope halter on Posey to get her up. We didn't want to push around on her any. Poor gal had been through enough. As soon as I tugged on the halter, she popped up. I tied her to a stock panel, and then we went to work guiding little butt into the right position and showing her how to latch on. She was a slow starter, but finally, she just went to town. Posey scared us at first because she did a LOT of dancing around and stamped one leg twice. I stayed behind the calf, and mom leaned against Posey and rubbed her side and slowly slid her hand down her side and onto the top of Posey's udder, then down to the nearest teat, and got the milk flowing from each teat. We were ready to jump away from her at any minute in case she started kicking, but everything was cool. Posey hardly moved. Little butt, on the other hand, was typical. She would get within an inch, and she would sull up, or lunge, or something. Talk about sore muscles! Crouching down, leaning, holding, really wears you out, and can make you cramp up. We had to take some rest breaks, too.
In the beginning, little butt almost acted like she was too tired to stand up and eat, but once we got her latched on long enough to get some milk in her tummy, you could just see her getting more and more perky.
I can hardly wait to go see her this morning! MORE PICTURES!!!
Posey will go to the dairy tomorrow so she can get taken care of. Unlike last year, Posey seems to have avoided mastitis. Last year she had three quarters of her udder affected. When mom hand-milked Posey last night, there were no signs of clumping. We were lucky since the flies have been so bad.
We've got Carmelita lined up to be Perriwinkle's nurse. Actually, we are thinking of calling Perriwinkle "Winki". We will be doing a lot of work the next two days.
We need to:
manage the last three feedings between Posey and Winki
move Posey from Cedar Hill to the dairy
move Winki to Carmelita's pen at Windy Hill
pull the calf shed over to the end of the heifer pens
make a pen around the front of the heifer shed, making it like a calf hutch
pull Cupcake from Carmelita's pen and put her into the calf hutch
manage Cupcake's weaning
probably give Tornado an injection to clear up a cough she has developed
It's going to be a busy time.
I'm ready to get this stuff DONE!
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