The Pear-ent Trap!

Sara is back where she belongs!  Well, almost . . . right now she's in the round pen right next to the barn.  As soon as Herb finishes digging his last posthole and sets a half dozen posts and hangs two gates and the wire, we'll open the gate between the round pen and the barnyard . . . and then Sara will truly be back where she belongs.  Back where she can safely have her calf!  As you can see in this photo, she's ready to pop!  Please, Sara, just give us a couple more days . . .

This is how it happened.  We put the horse trailer in the field and left it open.  Every evening we put Sara's feed farther up the ramp and finally into the trailer so she got used to going in farther and farther after her feed.  Today we took the horses out of the field so Brandy wouldn't run Sara off.  We also put some pears, for which Sara has a real weakness, even farther back in the trailer.  After she ate her feed, she stepped all the way into the trailer to get a pear--and quick as a wink Herb and I hauled up the ramp and slammed it shut!  Ta da!

It was then a simple matter to hook up the truck, drive the trailer up to the round pen, make two wing gates out of extra corral panels, back the trailer into place (well, simple for Herb!), let down the ramp and--Sara was home!  She settled right down to mowing the grass in the round pen, but she did spare a moment to eat a few more pears (see photo above) and to come over to greet Kara and me (photo at left).  She doesn't seem to harbor any ill will towards us for our base trick!  Nor has it seemed to put her off pears!  It's a-pear-ant that they are just too a-peel-ing for her to resist, and that has been her downfall!

We're just thankful to have her safe and sound where we can keep an eye on her.  We know she's had four calves before and is an old hand at this, but it's our first calf, so we're a little bit anxious!  But a lot less anxious now, I must say!  Thank You, Lord, for making it go so well that we kept thinking we must have missed something or done something wrong; it couldn't have been that easy!