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March 27, 2009

BEWARE...the calf.....

Ok so upon the request of a couple of friends I have decided to post pictures of the two-headed calf.....BEWARE (they really aren't bad)





March 23, 2009

15 weeks

I met with my midwife this morning and everything is looking good - measuring a little bigger than expected. I just figure I have a big baby in there since Jay was a 9 pounder! Other than headaches I'm feeling great still. Occasionally, I will get a really bad headache but I can't take anything for it unless I will be home - can't take them if I have to go to or am at work because of the barbiturates in the pill......so I've chosen to forgo the pills for now. I have started to feel some baby movements. It just feels like a little flutter right now....can't wait to actually feel a kick or a punch (I may eat those words later on lol). I go in 4 weeks for my ultrasound! It will be April 20th! I am so excited and hopefully Jay will be able to come with! I recorded the baby's heartbeat again (after accidentaly deleting it last time) - this time I've got it locked and am not going to mess with it. It was so neat this time because you could hear the baby moving around and bumping into the uterine wall!! It was so neat!

In other news - we had some unusual activity on the farm yesterday morning. Jay called and left a message on my phone at 8:30 am that he would not be making it to church because his dad, brother and him were pulling calf. I knew it wasn't good if he was still 2.5 hrs away from church even starting and knew already that he wouldn't make it! They ended up having to call the vet to come out because they couldn't get this calf out. The vet had to do a C-section on this cow (out in the pasture because the cow was having trouble standing - hence no moving up to the barn) and he pulled out a 2 headed calf. The calf obviously didn't make it but the cow should make a recovery. The calf appeared to have two breastbones and two spines....so we are thinking that it was an embryo that started to split into twins but didn't fully split resulting in Siamese/conjoined twins. It would have been interesting to do a necropsy on this calf to see how many organs were double or joined or whatever. The vet who came out had never seen anything like that in cattle - he'd seen it in pigs before - so we figure that we have a VERY low chance of this happening again. This deformity or lack of splitting occured w/in the first 20 days of fertilization of the embryo - kind of odd to realize that the whole time she was carrying this 2 headed calf.

Jay and I now have 3 calves on the ground - 2 heifers and a bull calf. The bull calf is out of our Mona Lisa cow that we received from Steve & Julie French the weekend we got engaged and one of the heifers is a blue roan out of the recip cow that was a gift from mom and dad that same weekend (that cow gave birth to twins, one of which we lost, and she had a bull calf last year for us). We still have two left to calve - which should be any day now or beginning of April.

Next weekend I am heading up to Michigan for the beef expo - I'm pretty sure that Christy and my nephew and I will be traveling up together. It will be good to see some family and friends! Well, that is all for now!