And so it begins....

All through the the latter part of February and the beginning of March we have had beautiful weather. Warm sun, melting snow and even warm nights. The 17th of March we had a snow storm and the 18th of March we started calving! Since that day we've had cold, snow, wind, and way below freezing temperatures.

This is the first of our babies, she is about 6 hours old and quite happy on the straw we spread for her.

Since her birth we've had 4 more - all girls. One was slightly premature and although she seemed to be all there, she was unable to suck and unable to stand on her own.

Dennis brought her into the house to warm her (we do have a place in the barn, but the furnace had gone out and we didn't have time to mess with it). While she was in we tried to get some food down her throat - it's very important that newborns get some warm milk in their tummies right away - this is when we realized she was probably born a few days too early.

We moved her down to the barn once it was warm in there and brought her mama in, and for the next couple of days we fed the little one via a stomach tube. Mama was not pleased with this arrangement and had to be tricked into moving into another pen while we messed with her baby.

After 3 days of hand feeding the little one and trying to get her to stand up we had just about given up and fully expected to find she had died when we went out yesterday morning, but lo and behold she was standing up by herself! We got a bottle and a soft nipple and tried feeding her, after much patient standing and waiting she began to suck. This morning she is bouncing around like a newborn calf should. In fact she is doing so well we let them out with the other new mamas.