Just when we thought winter was gone, we woke up to a bit of snow on the ground and no sunshine.

We sure do enjoy having animals.  Our neighbor told Jim when he took care of our animals last that our milk cow is like a pet, totally different than his beef cattle.  Lazer loves being scratched on her lower neck.  In fact, she will nudge Jim if he stops so he'll scratch her neck more.  The new calf is tagged #23 which is what we call her, she is adjusting well and Lazer has accepted her as her calf.  The quad, which consists of Lucy our Jersey calf, Rose who is our Milking Shorthorn/Devon cross beef calf that we'll be keeping and #24 and #25 all heifers, have been very curious about the new kid on the block.

I'm not sure what is going on with Typepad, but some of my photos will not show up on a post, and I somehow lost my banner, I put another one up, so we'll see if that disappears as well.

There you have it, yogurt, butter and cheese.  I have been having so much fun, especially being able to make butter, we have no calf on our milk cow right now, so we are getting a lot of milk and cream.  I am so excited to try the hard cheese when it's ready, I put a wax on it and will turn it at least twice a week.  We are making hay while the sun shines. 

Yesterday we had the vet out for a preg check on our milk cow and she's not pregnant, we were pretty disappointed.  So, we'll try AI once again and maybe the third time will be the charm.  Still haven't tapped trees yet but not sure how much sap is running yet.  It's busy, busy, here on the homestead.

After checking on the heifer for what seemed like forever, doing day, evening and night checks, Lazer's baby finally arrived and it's a heifer (girl) calf.  I will admit we were not disappointed in the calf being a heifer.

Lazer has turned into a very good momma, here they are when the calf is about 10 hours old and trying to find some breakfast.  I think we went to sleep around 12:30 a.m. after what could have been a disaster but turned out not too bad.  The heifer was pretty weak still around the 11:30 p.m. mark, being about an hour after she freshened, and not really standing up yet or even trying, we helped her to latch on to get some colostrum into her which is very vital for her as soon as possible.  Jim got up at 2:00 a.m. to get her to latch on and suck and Lazer would stand but wanted to continue to lick her which is great, but the calf needed to get to eating.  Jim had to tie her to a post so that the calf could suck.

Jim being the always early riser that he is headed out to the barn to check on momma and baby.  He took this photo as he sat in the stall to watch the two.  Being that Lazer is a first-time momma she has been an absolute gem; we fortunately were able to get up close to not only her but her calf as well.  I'm guessing Lazer is enjoying her new home with us and trusts us with her calf.

We haven't named our new calf yet and we need to do that soon.  The experience of seeing the birth of an animal here on our homestead was nothing short of amazing.