Chickens

As you may have noticed, CHEMTD has been offline for a while. Internet forums have been abuzz with speculation as to the cause of our absence. The more popular theories posted seem to be that we were too busy because of the move to our new, Barmet Bay location, or that we were suffering from a case of writer's block, or - and this one doesn't even deserve acknowledging - that we were "too lazy" to update the blog!

The truth of the matter is that while there was a lot to write about in the past few weeks, those events had failed to resolve themselves into any sort of workable theme. That is at least until recently, when it appeared as though a pattern was emerging.



First up, Crystal and Jeremy invited us to their lake where Crystal prepared an Easter Egg hunt for the kids. Everyone had a lot of fun playing together and the kids enjoyed searching for the multicolored plastic eggs filled with candy.



Next, we got to see our Hardy cousins not once, but two weeks in a row. The first visit was from Jewel's family and we went to the zoo to see the updates to the prehistoric park. I have to admit that I was impressed when we came upon the first animatronic dinosaur, roaring and chomping and wagging its tail. The younger kids cried a little and had to be reassured by their parents that the dinosaurs weren't real, which totally hampered my own attempt at convincing my kids that, "oh my goodness, I think the zoo got a real dinosaur by mistake!"




I like this picture because I respect the kind of practical, good advice the sign embodies. "Do not touch Dinosaurs". Of course, that makes perfect sense to me. It's so fundamental you'd think it would go without saying, but at one point in the day I caught Tyson throwing little sticks at them. I thought to myself, "you wouldn't have survived 5 minutes in the caveman days; that stick isn't going to do anything to the dinosaur except draw its attention to you." That's exactly the sort of thing 'natural selection' is talking about.

Another thing I noticed was how Jewel kept calling the kids "chickens", as in, "come on little chickens, lets go this way". I thought it was cute and kind of an appropriate way of describing the noisy little flock. I chose to use that as the title of this post, the same way that book titles are sometimes based on a comment or event that happens in passing at about the halfway point of the story (after you have been wondering the whole time just what the title is supposed to mean).



The following week, Tanis and her kids also came up. While the cousins had a great time together, and everyone is best of friends, I still noticed that there seemed to be a bit of a pecking order. The only thing I could be certain of is that Jessica is at the very bottom of it. She is such a little sweetie though, she didn't seem to be bothered.

Before everyone left to return home, Jewel and Tanis gave Ella and I some birthday presents. In my card from Jewel I found a package of multicolored chocolate eggs. I didn't give much thought to the eggs because, as Jewel felt she needed to clarify when I opened them, they only cost her $0.15.






One further note about pecking order, I took this group of snapshots the other night but still never "saw" it until I looked through them later. It appears as though there is a similar phenomenon amongst our kids. The little yellow chick doesn't seem too bothered by his place in the social hierarchy but, like baby Jessica, that almost makes it more sad.



Lastly, we received an unexpected phone call from friends of ours asking if we could look after their chickens while they went out of town. This is a job we volunteered for because we wanted a source of fresh, non-factory eggs for our new healthy lifestyle (and yesterday morning I had almost a half-dozen of the breakfast taquitos Heather made with these eggs and I feel healthier already). Also, I saw it as a great way to get the kids doing chores that were dirty and smelly while at the same time caring for something that was alive. This is probably the closest we will get to my dream of having a hobby farm while the kids are young.

The boys were a little standoffish to begin with, and Ella kept saying, "disgusting" in kind of a valley-girl pitch that reminded me of an awesome story Tanis told us in which she had threatened Abby, "if you talk to me like a teenager one more time, I'm going to give you a facewash with snow." The boys were easy to handle, all I had to do was promise a stick of gum to anyone who could touch a chicken before it ran away. Once they had done that, there was nothing else to be worried about and soon Tyson was inside the coop spreading wood shavings for bedding. Ella came around too and helped Heather collect the eggs.

I didn't know this beforehand, but apparently hens from different breeds will produce shells of different colours. When the girls showed me the basket of white, brown, and blue-green ovals they had collected, the multicolored eggs made me think two things:

First I thought, "I've seen this before"

Which then made me think...



"I'm ready to write a blog."



- C