If I'd a cow that made such milk...

We have been watching craigslist for months and contacting individuals and writing to all the dairies within a 3 hour drive from us searching for a family milk cow for months now.  

Quite a few of our weekends have been taken up with going to look at a cow and discussing it and making a decision.   

We just brought home our new family milk cow.  Our neighbor was kind enough to haul her for us.  It's such a blessing to have good neighbors!  She doesn't have a name yet, but she is ours now and she is home at last. 

She is a young cow with her whole reproductive and milk producing life ahead of her, Lord willing!

This is her first calf, a sweet little heifer who also doesn't have a name yet.

She has never had a halter or rope on before so just after I snapped that picture of her she fell to the ground and did the famous "dead calf trick".  I was waiting for it...it is just too cute to miss. :)  

I had left some sweet feed in the bucket over in her new milking area for her to discover.  I want her to think she's in heaven here.  She really enjoyed it!  She kept going back in and checking to make sure she hadn't left any behind or if maybe it had been refilled in her absence.  

We recreated the place the previous owner had been training her to milk in so that she would feel comforted by something familiar as we get to know one another before we move her to the dairy parlor and milk her in the stanchion there.  So far, so good!

The children all did a lot of work to get everything ready and I'm proud of them.  They are getting quite good at digging and fencing and building things now.  

Here is the happy mama with her dear little baby munching some hay as they observe the little ones who were on the other side of the stall fence getting to see them for the first time.

She is a purebred registered Jersey (the name on her eartag is "Sterno") and her baby is a limousine cross.  The calf will be our second milk cow for staggering our milk supply and for providing milk for any other calves we raise for meat or profit.

It is so fun to share all of these adventures with our children and learn to be good stewards and take good care of our animals.  Everyone wants to have the responsibility for the calfie!  It will be so rewarding to get to raise her and keep her and not have to send her off for beef.

Tomorrow will be a fun day!  We will milk her ourselves for the first time, other than when we met her and did our "test drive" to see if she was gentling down nicely.  So exciting! 

"If I'd a cow that made such milk,

I'd dress her in the finest silk.

Feed her up on oats and hay,

And milk her twenty times a day!"

~Civil War Poem