The Gift That Keeps On Giving

My son, Elisha, is six years old. He just turned six about a month ago. Most six year old boys probably want a toy robot or truck. My son wanted a calf. You'd think the darling boy would be content with the 20 chickens and 30 odd sheep and goats. No, somehow he has an affinity to chattel. Personally, I don't like cows. They're large, stupid, clumsy and high maintenance. If you need to contain it somehow, you cannot use muscle strength alone to wrestle it down. Ah, chattel.

I spent months alerting family members of his desires so that they didn't spend their money on toys. I also spent those months posting and reposting on craigslist and calling all cattle and dairy people I knew to get a pulse on when some calves might be available.

Finally, I had two connections lined up in case one fell through. One was with an organic jersey dairy about a 2 hour drive from here. The other was with a jersey dairy much more local--maybe 30 minutes. The first calf born was the more local one. When my husband took Elisha to go pick up his calf, they actually gave us two. When the boys got home, I figured out why. One of the calves looked healthy enough, but the other was weak and had terrible diarrhea. I sighed and made up the bottles and decided to try to take care of it. By morning, it couldn't stand. By evening, Daniel had to euthanize it. I warned him to check calves over before bringing them home in the future. There's no such thing as free for no reason in the livestock world.

The second calf was born and ready less than a week later. The boys headed out and made a day of picking up the calf from the organic dairy. He was lively and readily took the bottle. However, a problem developed. The calves weighed about 70 lbs. and Elisha weighed about 60 lbs. Every time the calves took the bottle, they overpowered Elisha. He couldn't manage them, so I had to hold a bottle on each hip (because each bottle held over half a gallon of milk) and let the calves nurse from them. This was exhausting as the calves would bump the bottles and fight each other off and lose the nipples ( I told you they were dumb ) and then start bumping ME all over.

Twice a day now, I was making up over a gallon of formula at a time and feeding the calves. After a week of this, I came out one morning and saw that these calves, too now, were ill. They had a soft cough, runny noses, and no appetite along with the diarrhea. I looked it up online and immediately recognized the symptoms of shipping fever. Shipping fever is a sickness extremely common among bottle baby calves that are moved at a young age. It's simply an outworking of the suppressed immune system from the stress of being moved. In the end, it's a form of pneumonia and calves typically die of asphyxiation when they get it. Immediately, I ran to Tractor Supply and got sulfamethazine boluses (pills) to give them along with some vitamins in drench form. Now, I was administering medicine, trying to coax them to eat, giving them vitamins, and checking on their progress 5 times a day.

Some birthday present! Happy birthday, Elisha!

It'd be easy for me to get a bad attitude about this. If my son were like other boys, he'd get his toy robot and the most work I'd have to do is tell him to not leave it on the floor. Now, I was working from first thing in the morning til 9 at night upkeeping his calves.

I have recently come to realize that this is a unique opportunity for me to show my son how much I love and support him. He's not likely to forget this. If he had gotten his toy robot, likely it wouldn't have lasted more than a few months without being broken and thrown away. I am now providing him something much better---a gift that gives over and over. The gift that I'm giving him isn't his calves; the gift I'm giving him is me.

"For God so loved the world, that he gave His only Son, and whoever believes in Him will not die, but live forever." -John 3:16

This is the most quoted verse in the Bible, but it's also the most powerful. God gave himself to us, because that's the greatest gift He could have ever given. He could have just let us putz around on earth and play til we died, but we would never have been intimates with Him or experienced His love.

I'm glad that God has made this experience with the calves difficult. I'm glad that he allowed Elisha to like something that I don't. I'm glad because if it were easy, it wouldn't be a memorable expression of love. Truly meaningful love costs something. My son knows that my love is not a one time thing, but that it's a sacrificial and forebearing love that has an outworking from first thing in the morning until last thing at night.

May God be praised!