Our Orphaned Lamb Died :( Getting Steers & Hogs In One Weekend!

Hi guys, this is Megan with the blog, WilsonHelmstead.com and welcome to today's blog. We are all getting ready to go in the truck. Luke moved all the car seats over. He had to fit all three car seats in the three seats in the back of our old truck and we're taking Hilda, we're taking Marjorie, the lamb, named her Marjorie by the way, and we are all gonna pile in the truck and we are gonna go pick up two steers and three piglets. It all lined up to happen on the same weekend, which is actually kind of nice because we had to borrow a trailer to go get all of them. So it's just kind of nice to do it all in one trip. So poor little Marjorie has seemed really lethargic today. I talked to the person we got the Barbados from and he thought it could be acidosis. So I've been feeding her, I give her some milk with baking soda in it because if it's acidosis, that'll clear it up really quick. So I'm just having to feed her with a syringe because she's seeming really lethargic and she just wants to lay down and close her eyes. And so I'm trying to get as much in her as possible. I gave her an ounce before we left and now I'm gonna see if I can get another ounce in her. And then we'll know pretty quickly if it is acidosis. She should perk up within half an hour. And if she doesn't, then it's something else that I don't know how to fix. All right, we're here to get the cows. We have to load them up in the trailer. They're just a couple yearling steers that we're gonna use for meat for this fall. I'm really excited to have some of our own cows. This is the first time we've had our own cows. We had our brother-in-law's cows on the property last fall and it was fun to have some bigger animals, but now we have our own steers. And next year, we're gonna be getting our own milk cow. So we're branching off into bigger animals. Wow. We picked up the piglets. They were all stuffed in one little kennel and it was really hard to get them out. They were all in there in a bunch of sardines. So we finally got them out. We just put them in the back of the trailer. There's a divider. So the cows are in the front of the trailer and the hogs are in the back of the trailer. And Hilda's also in the back of the trailer in her kennel. So it's quite a circus. I can't wait to unload everyone and get in the house. It's been like the worst day to do all this because it's like snowing like crazy and the roads aren't very good. But we'll be home soon and we can just watch the animals and make sure they don't get out of the fences. We're unloading the steers. Hopefully they don't get out. Vee-vee. Woo-hoo! Vee-vee. All right, Luke's setting up a bale of hay so that they come out of the trailer and they hopefully just go straight for the hay and they don't try to run too much further because we're testing out if just this electric fence will work or not. I only see one cow. I guess open that and run. Oh yeah. Hopefully they'll just walk. Well, I guess you're not knocking that over? I guess it's fine. The charger's on. There they are. I'm gonna go test the fence right away, I guess. Uh-oh. Oh, they stopped. Good. If they could get shocked once, that would make me feel better. Ah, the horses are snorting at them. Yeah. We can see pigs out our window. That's so cool. The cows are still in after our break. We went and had coffee, but they're still freaking out about those horses a little bit. They're all scared of each other over the fence. But the cows seem interested in the sheep too, but not overly interested, which is good, but we're gonna keep them separated for a while still so that the little tiny lambs don't get squished. All the sheep are doing really good. So far, all those babies have done just amazing in the snow. I'm so happy that the moms are doing such a good job with them. Hey, you're not very big, are you? Stanley's getting so mean again. Get out of here. Come on. Why are you so scary? Let's put Stanley back in the duck yard where he goes. That'll teach him a lesson. Come on. Go back in your yard. Come on. Yeah, I'm not that scared of you. Go on. Back in your yard. Good boy. The ducks are sassing him. See, I like him when he's in the duck yard because he gets put in his place by these ducks and he's not so mean to me. We tried to clip his wing, but he's still complying with the chicken yard. He's so rude when he's over there. And he's such a good fix. He needs to be on dinner, he's pretty useless. So it's taken me a few days to feel ready to explain what happened to Marjorie. So we brought her in the truck with us because I was really concerned about how lethargic she was doing, but the baking soda didn't perk her up like I hoped it would, so it wasn't acidosis. And her body temperature kept falling. One of our stops was my brother-in-law's house and they took her temperature. Sheep are supposed to be 102 degrees and she was what, like 85, 88, like way too low. So we tried to warm her by the fire and then when we left, they had wrapped her in blankets and I put her in front of the truck heater, but she just seemed to get more and more sleepy, like she was just wanting to close her eyes and fall asleep and it was getting harder to wake her up to try to feed her. So it was obviously a problem that we couldn't fix. And actually, I feel like that's probably why her mom abandoned her. Looking back, she was never as energetic as the other lambs were. Like the day after the rest of the lambs were born, they were skipping around and playing and she never was that energetic. She would run to follow me, but she wouldn't skip around and play. So looking back, I think there was something wrong with her all along and it wasn't something that I could have fixed. And that's probably like sheep are crazy smart. They have these crazy instincts that we don't understand and that mama knew that something was wrong with her baby and she didn't wanna take resources from her strong baby to try to save that one when it probably wasn't favorable. So I'm really sad. I mean, when you live on a farm, you learn to deal with loss, but something just hits differently when you expect it to be a pet and you expect it to just be around for years. And we got up at night to bottle feed her like a newborn and we had five whole days with her and we just kind of assumed that she would be just fine. She would just eventually go with the other sheep, but that she would be just this really tame pet and just hang out on the porch for a long time. And so it was just kind of a hard thing to lose her after expecting something differently. So when you raise an animal to butcher, it's different. It's not quite as heartbreaking when you butcher them because that was their purpose. But when you have an animal that you expected to keep and they end up not making it, it's really sad. So it's a few days later now and it's taken me that long to want to talk about it because I've just been really sad about her. So there's nothing else we could have done and she had a really great five whole days and the kids loved on her and she was happy for those five days she was here. But the steers and the pigs are doing really great. We haven't had any escapees. Other than that, the steers did get in with where the sheep are a couple of times, but it's not like they got out on the road, so I'm not terribly worried about that. But they're all doing really good and it's so fun to have some different kinds of animals. I'm gonna end the vlog here. I hope you guys enjoyed seeing us getting the steers and the hogs and sorry to leave it on somewhat of a sad note about little baby Marjorie, but I'm gonna leave you guys with some B-roll of the other lambs playing because they're all doing so good. But thank you for watching and I'll see you in my next video. Bye.