Friday, July 11, 2008

July 4 - Feeding the baby calf

I have tons of 4th of July pictures so I decided I would separate them by subject and post the different subjects one at a time. Today I am posting the pictures I took of Emma feeding the baby calf. Some friends of my parents have 6 bucket calves that they bought at a sale barn and are now down to 2 bottle feedings a day. We were lucky enough to get in on one of those feedings. I knew Emma would just LOVE it, and she did.


Emma was thrilled to death to see that it was an actual bottle that she would be feeding to the calf!


Some of the calves get a little rough with the feedings and do some "butting" so I had to help Emma hold the bottle at first. After we determined the calf we had was pretty gentle, I let her hold the bottle on her own until it got down to the point where he was getting air unless you tipped it way up.


Mom makes sure the baby gets as little air as possible. Don't want any upset tummies! :-)



They are so cute when they are little!



Emma watches as another calf is fed from the bottle



My sister Kysa told Emma to stick her finger out there and see what happens! She thought that was pretty funny that it sucked her finger.



Her finger was pretty slimy when she pulled it out of the his mouth!


After their bottle feedings they got some grain to eat as well.


Here's a little video that Scott took of Emma and Mom feeding the baby calf.

I remember we had bucket calves when we were little and I remember feeding them bottles. This will be a memory Emma will keep with her forever and we were so fortunate to have this opportunity. Thanks G'ma Pipi and G'pa Carole for making this memory happen!

Here lately, out of the blue, Emma keeps asking me, "Mom, when are you going to have another baby?" I keep telling her, "I don't know that we will have anymore babies Emma." She's never really satisfied with that answer. I've been wondering where this has been coming from, and now, after this post, I'm thinking it's coming from feeding the baby calves?

Fast forward to today, July 11:

A quiet day on the home front. I believe we are going to go to Tuttle tonight and come back later Saturday afternoon so we can go to church on Sunday morning. I'm thinking Dustin and Colton aren't going to be too impressed with Tuttle, since the town they live in is probably half the size of Tuttle! This will be like normal for them! However, we don't have the luxuries in Tuttle that they have in Sharpsburg, so there will be no television, computer or air conditioning! UGH! I'll try to post more tomorrow after we get back.

2 comments:

Kara said...

That is so much fun and she'll always have stories to tell about bottle feeding that calf! Cute! Sometime you guys will have to make a roadtrip up to our farms so you can have some more fun experiences!

Anonymous said...

What a delightful post! I wish my first and only experience feeding a calf had been as happy and peaceful as Emma's, but it wasn't. I enjoyed your words and pictures so much that I linked to this post from an article I wrote about how not to feed a baby cow, so that my readers understand there is a proper way...I just didn't follow it!