Cow teats are a lot firmer than I had imagined.

So about a week ago, my husband tells me that he's going to go help out at Kookoolan farm this weekend (HERE and HERE are previous posts about Kookoolan). I responded by telling him I was so jealous, probably even more jealous than if he were going out strip club hopping, lol. But of course also happy that he was going to go help them out & absorb fantastic farm knowlege. He spent all day long there yesterday, helping them get their products ready for the Hillsdale farmers market, learning how to milk the cows & a bunch of other good stuff. And then he calls me at the end of the day & asks me if I'd like to bring the kids out the next day (today), and milk the cows for the farm so that they could get some needed sleep before the market today (otherwise they'd have to get up at 4am to get the milking done). I laughed out loud, "Do you have to ask?? I can't imagine anything else in the whole world I'd rather do!" I am the biggest farm dork in all the land.


So today, we milked cows!! And it was soooo fun! Although chasing a toddler through cow pies AND being 33 weeks pregnant whilst doing it wasn't the easiest thing. I seriously pulled some muscle from my belly to my crotch chasing Son2 down a hill. He started running down a sidewalk toward the goats that gets steep fast & I pictured him face planting & scraping his whole face off so I moved far faster than a 33 week pregnant person is supposed to move to catch him. Then I had to go whine with a laugh to Husband that I had "sprained my labia". haha. (Sorry, that's probably way too much information for this public blog that my whole family reads, but when you spend your days watching birth videos & planning for your upcoming childbirth, suddenly labias just don't seem like a taboo subject. HAHA)

ANYWAY. It was great fun, great FILTHY fun (have you ever tried holding onto a temper tantruming toddler who has at least one goopy cow pie stuck to each shoe & is waving them around wildly at you? Too bad I didn't come equipped with a rubber apron & goggles) & I learned lots. I learned that milking 5 cows, & filtering & preparing their raw milk to be sold is very time consuming!! Geez! Granted we were total amatuers & it probably should have taken us half as long, but still, it normally takes the owners about 2.5 hours to get the job done. And they've run out of time lately & so are only able to do it once per day. Can you imagine spending 5 hours per day just doing the milking/jarring up for your 5 cows? What a chore!
On with the pictures. :)

My hunky husband fetching a cow:


They were all easy to fetch except for one, who reeeeally didn't want to be captured & put up a big fight & made us all run through cow nasties for a long time before we finally cornered & caught her. I'm pretty sure she was laughing at us. Son1 helping out with the cow fetching:



There are a whole series of boob scrubbings, sprayings & disinfectings that go on before the milking starts. Also, we had to milk a sample from each teat into this little tray & Husband performed some scientific voodoo ritual test on each one to be sure the milk wasn't high in white blood cells. Here Son1 milks a cow for the first time! :) He's squirting out the test samples.


Sooo many of my pictures turned out blurry, but everyone & everything kept moving! haha. I took several pictures of Husband doing the scrubbing & disinfectings (I asked him at one point if he wanted to put the picture I was taking of him scrubbing a cow's nipples on his Christmas cards to his family), but those were all blurry, too. Oh well. We have our cow teat scrubbing memories..... Anyway, here's Husband showing his son the joys of cow milking:

Hi cow! How's the boobies? It was so weird to see the cow come in with her gigantic, firm udder & teats & then see them all deflated after the sucker machine emptied her out. Their udders get all floppy & shrively. I'm sure it feels very relieving!


Speaking of relieving, sometimes at the beginning their milk would let down & just start spraying because they were so full. I know exaaaactly how that feels!! haha


The goats were so funny, they were soo curious. This one's peeking in the door, "What are you doing in there? Huh? Huh?"


And here I am. I have Son2 in the sling, breastfeeding. I have a belly full of baby, and I am milking a cow. There's a lot of lactation going on this picture. :D


Hand milking was so super groovy. It felt so weird! Here I had pictured in my mind a cow's udder to be pretty floppy & soft & bald. But they're REALLY firm & heavy & veiny when full of milk. And their nipples in the back are much shorter than the ones in front & hard to get a good hold of. But, I must say, I had it down from my first teat squeeze. HAHA. I'm a natural cow milker. Who knew!

Oooo, a Son1-petting-cow action shot!


Here Husband & Son1 discuss the finer points of cow milking beneath a giant full udder.


The cows were smart. Husband would open the shed door & they'd know right where to go. They'd walk up into their shute & start munching away from their tasty bucket. We discussed what it must be like to come stick your face in a bucket & slurp up food after all your friends.

The milk comes out SO hot. It's immediately put on ice, then filtered through cloth into the jars its sold in & put in the fridge. So Son1 got all scrubbed up, and poured the thick, creamy, delicious raw milk into the first jars. He had to take "itch breaks" & scratch all his itches before scrubbing up & going back to work. lol You have to stir the milk constantly before putting it into the jars because the cream separates so fast. Milk fresh from a healthy cow is SO so different from that weird, watery, pasteurized, homogenized stuff on the grocery store shelves. The milk was so soft & creamy that when I had my arm in it I wanted to just jump right in & bathe in it. lol Ok, maybe I'm just a little weird. But it's so soft! Really!!


The concentrating milk filtering master at work:


All in all, I think we got about 32 half gallon jars filled. So, if you purchase milk from Kookoolan anytime soon, it very well may be the very milk we squirted from the cows today & I fantasized about bathing in. :D

Snack time!

Turkeys do not gobble. Or, at least, they sure didn't today. They were very talkative the whole day, but all they said is ARF! "arf! arf" arf!" go the turkeys. I wonder when it is they gobble? Maybe when trying to attract a mate? Or when frightened or something? Or maybe these ones are too young? Or it's not gobbling season? Or maybe only certain breeds actually gobble? Hmmmmmm. Contemplating turkey sounds.........


Haha! Here is Son2 checking out what the goat's got going on below. "Watcha got under there, goat?"


Son1 & Son2 hanging out with the weirdly calm & friendly chicken. Son1 was really impressed with how friendly she was. But I secretly wondered if maybe she's just mentally challenged or dying or something. haha. She really was kind of weird. But friendly! :p


So friendly that she kept allowing Son2 to pick her up, even though he doesn't quite know the difference yet between carrying a chicken & strangling one.


Ahh, lovely view. Yamhill, Oregon is a lovely place. OREGON is a lovely place. I'm so glad I live here. <3


Oh look! A lovely view of my pants! I think I wore a complete cow pie home. I blame it on Son2. It really isn't that filthy of a job, if you wear rubber boots or something to protect your feet from the random goat that likes to stand next to people & release their bladder. It was kind of wet what with all the hosing off of udders going on, but really, it wouldn't be so bad to have a family cow or 2. It wouldn't be a life sentence of cow poop pants. Unless you plan to have toddlers all your life. ;)


Somehow I didn't notice the weird bar in the center of my picture before, but I liked this one I took earlier in the morning of a cow & the fog. Very Pacific Northwesty farm landy. :)


And one more of the curious goats. They're just so funny & full of personality. Their expressions are goofy. Here they're totally looking at us like "Hi! Whattya doin'??"


Then on the drive home we fantasized about owning a fantastic piece of farm land out there. The Willamette Valley is a grand, gorgeous, fertile place. We want to grow gardens & cows out in it. <3

ETA: Man, I wish I weren't so computer illiterate. I cannot figure out why just ONE of those pictures is funtioning correctly so that when you click on it the picture appears larger. Ack. I've got to go to bed. Tomorrow I shall harass my very computer literate husband about helping me figure it out.

ETA again: Well I just reposted the whole post, with functioning photos. But lost the comments from the original post so I copied them to this one. YAY for me being so complicated about my silly cow boob pictures!