Preg Checking

So you may be wondering what Preg Checking is. I'm not. I know what it is. Consider yourself lucky to be ignorant.

Just a heads up, this post is maybe not my most PG, so if you're easily grossed out by things, or if you're my Grandmother, you should maybe not read this one....

In the spring after all the calves have been born, the bulls are reintroduced to the cow herd and the whole throng is turned out to pasture (oooh listen to me! Practically a natural!) for the summer, to eat, breed, and fatten up. Tis the life. Come fall, when everyone is getting ready to sell, they gather their herds back up, to, I don't know, evaluate? (maybe not quite a natural...) their stock and see who or what they want to sell. This includes preg checking, which if you haven't guessed, is checking to see who is pregnant. Then you typically sell the "empty" or "dry" ones and decide what you want to do with the preggos.

It's the process of preg checking that I want to share with you. Ladies, if you have ever been pregnant you may sympathize with these poor beasts. The veterinarian showed up in the morning in full regalia, I'm talking head-to-toe plastic covering and a shoulder length plastic gloves. Now typically, as I understand it, a vet checks a cow by palpating (feeling) for a specific vein which when enlarged indicates she is pregnant. Or if she is far enough along the vet may also feel the fetus itself. But the vet we hired has a super cool, albeit cringe inducing, portable ultrasound machine. It's basically a 3 foot long (for lack of a better word) dildo attached to a battery containing backpack. It's super interesting! And he had this special goggles that float just above his eyes that allow him to see whats going on inside, while not losing visualization of the outside world.

So basically, we round up all the cows, sort them cows from calves into a corral, which funnels into a chute, which ends in a 'squeeze' and we just start pushing them through the line, one after the other. And assembly line style, the vet inserts the giant dildo and checks to see if there is a calfer. If there is none, he spray paints a big ole' O on her back for Open, and if it is inconclusive, he sprays a dot and we have to stop her in the 'squeeze' to enable the Doc to get in behind her for manual palpation.... I'm cringing just remembering.

To be completely honest, I am not even sure which ... ahum... "entrance" the doctor used for all this... It's a little hard to tell, and one thing I learned about cows is that it doesn't matter what you're doing with them, there is going to be a lot of poop involved....

And then the cows walk off as if nothing happened!! As if this kind of thing happens to them all the time!! To a complete newbie its a disorienting whirlwind of noise, and poop, and disconcerting indifference.

So that is preg checking. I am sorry if I have marred your sensibilities. To some it's just another day on the ranch. For me it begs the question "Is this really my life now?"

It's a Redneck Halloween!

So it was our first Halloween at the ranch this year! And we received an invitation to go to a Halloween party and potluck with "tailgate trick-or-treating" at the local community hall! The other option would be to drive an hour to town with a tired baby and 3 sugar high kids to go trick-or-treating, so we voted on community hall. Despite having been here for over 10 months, I still haven't really met anyone, aside from our closest neighbour, my esthetician, and my tattoo lady.... So I wanted to go also as a sort of coming out, meet the neighbours, let them know who I am thing. Plus, the invitation said "tailgates drop at 6 pm.", and it was so nauseatingly redneck, I couldn't pass it up!

The kids were suitably adorable. Oliver was a red dragon, Silas a military man (or a warrior, as he says), and Isabella was a pirate, complete with mustache tattoos.

Getting there was an adventure in itself. From about October to June our area of the Caribou is just riddled with deer. I mean all over the place. In the winter we make a game out of counting how many deer we see in a trip. The record so far is 182. It wasn't nearly as bad as that, but you really have to keep your eyes open. The babies, too, they don't really know what they are doing yet, so you come across one of them and they just run down the center line for a while, like the victim in a bad action movie.

Anyways, we got there without incident, but realized we had forgotten the babies costume. She was supposed to be an owl, and looked adorable, but she rejected it immediately in the dress rehearsal so I guess it really wasn't that great a loss. The parking lot had maybe 15 vehicles in it, tailgates facing out and decorated. We brought all 7 of our carved pumpkins and set them up as a sort of lit runway to the back of our van. Not too many tailgates, but plenty of kids, which was great. Everyone got to go trick-or-treating round 2 and really score.

The community hall, I learned, was just reopened this year after 24 years out of commission. So really, from the road, it just looks like an old run down barn, and inside it's... much the same, but it added to the ambiance! The organizers decorated the basement as a haunted house, which was really cool! And my kids totally surprised me by loving it! The best part was when someone moved a box in the haunted house and a real pack rat when scurrying away! So authentic!

I met several people, most of whom I forget their names. I remember saying at one point, that I was having trouble keeping people straight because of all the camouflage gear around... No joke, every 3rd person or so, was in a camouflage something. I really should have taken a picture. Silas, in his head-to-toe camo didn't even look like he was in a costume....

It was really really enjoyable. The kids had a tonne of fun.  I think my daughter may have a crush on one of our neighbour's boys. At one point I just glanced over to them sitting together and she gave me a "Don't look at me! This is not what you think it is!" kind of look. Pretty cute, and terrifying.

I'm hoping next year will be even bigger. More tailgates, more kids. Maybe this time next year I will even know a few people! Maybe I will have even rightly assimilated and I'll have a camouflage jacket of my own!