Right after midnight Phil went out to check on the "imminent" cow. Imminence had finally come to fruition, and the newborn calf was lying, waiting, while the mama delivered the afterbirth.
Phil and I stayed up another hour, waiting to check her again. An hour later, she had just finished delivering the afterbirth, and stood up as we approached.
The calf, we were chagrined to see, was not on hay, as we had thought, but on snow. The poor baby was shivering pitifully, still fairly wet from the birthing fluids in the 20-something degree chill. Poor baby. Phil carried it up to the cowshed, kicked the other mama and baby out, and I did my best to dry and warm the calf with a towel, while Phil tried to corral the confused mama into the pen. She could not figure out where her baby went.
We locked them in together for the night. I didn't strip teats, I didn't make sure the baby ate, I didn't even finish drying the calf off. Phil's perspective continues to be: let them do their thing. So rather than try to find colostrum, rather than try to get my hands on a cow for the first time, instead we just let them alone, sheltered and confined.
It was after 1am, and we were going to bed. Would we find a dead calf in the morning? Possibly. But, as Phil said, if I hadn't checked her, we wouldn't have known till morning, and the calf has a better shot in the sheltered pen than on the snow.
As I was falling asleep, I thought about this. When we first moved here, every birth was a big event. I would go out, observe however much I could, follow the instructions of the books: supplements, toweling off, tutoring to the teat. We still had a good many lambs die.
Because we believed God had told us to start a farm, I expected we would be like Jacob, whose herds multiplied amazingly under his care. So animal births and subsequent deaths struck not only at my confidence as a competent caregiver, but at my connection with God. (I'm not saying it should have, but if I'm being honest, it did.)
That's a far cry from now. We're happy enough for animal births. But if the calf died in the night, well, we did what we felt was prudent and manageable, and that is either enough or not.
It's a little odd to have a birth be such a blase event. And yet, I think it's actually more emotionally healthy. That seems a conundrum, a curiosity.
Happily, the baby bull was standing and vigorously nursing in the morning, so the minimal efforts we expended proved sufficient.
And on a completely different note, Phil made a tent town for the boys after church. Not only did it use our comforters and blankets, but all the kitchen chairs as well. They had a good time inside!
Joe then came up with a different idea. He acted out Christian, from Pilgrim's Progress. First burdened.
Then free!
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