The Chickens

We've recently become close friends with a family who is doing what we want to be doing in the near future: living off the land. They are very gracious and inviting and have taken us under their wing. Mostly under their chicken's wings...

We're raising 50 broiler chickens with them this summer, providing half of the capital and as much man-power as they need, too. We go to the farm to take care of the chicks at least once a week and Rob and Paul built two "chicken tractors" which will be the home for these chickens as they reach maturity. They'll spend their last 3-4 weeks out in the pasture in the sunshine feasting on bugs and grasses and having about the best life a soup-pot destined chicken can have.

This will be the first time I've been around chicken butchering since I was about Maggie's age and while I think it's important to raise our own food, to know what goes into it (literally, like the aforementioned bugs and grass), and to respect it in a way you can't do when you buy a slab of sterile meat at the big box grocery, I am not looking forward to the carnage that's in these chickens' future. I have a soft heart for animals. And I love to eat them. It's a hard dichotomy to work with.

Happily, especially for my girls, there are also 8 new layer hens who do not have the same fate as the broilers. The girls know that they can spoil and pet the layers and that they will not be Sunday dinner. I think that will create a little bit of comfort for them. This is a hard life lesson, that food sometimes comes from the death of an animal. It used to be common place.

I hope to instill in my kids the respect for food that has been lost in the last few generations as we move further and further from the homestead and animals become cogs in a machine, arriving in our refrigerators faceless and nearly bloodless. I hope my family will approach mealtimes with more reverence, that less meat will be left on plates, that left-overs will be eaten with gratitude instead of a grudge. It may be too much to ask.

But I don't think that it is. Have you hugged your food source lately? You should.

A Matter of Size

While sitting at dinner yesterday Beatrice was talking about the sizes of the people in our family. We've been talking about how Maggie is growing up and about how big Obie is getting and she hears these things and computes them in her odd little mind. So at dinner she's looking at everyone's plates or cups or something and starts going through how big each person is by how big their item is. She starts, "Obie is big. I'm bigger. Maggie is biggest!" Then she stops for a moment. "And Mom is, uh, uh, biggest..er. And Dad is most biggest of all!!"

Biggester. I'm not sure that's a title I want to live up to.

A Big Week for Margaret

This week has been full of surprises for Maggie... and for her parents, too. It started last Wednesday when Rob took the one remaining training wheel off of her bike and told her it was time to learn how to ride. Maggie's pretty nervous about trying adventurous things and did quite a bit of complaining, but she and I went out to the road to practice. First she pushed with her feet to practice balancing, then we went a little ways with me holding onto the seat and the handlebars, then ever so gradually, she tried to get both feet on the peddles and push before losing balance. And then eventually she got it.

(Remembering how to balance, and worrying that Obie's in the way. He and his cow are unconcerned.)

Because she's so timid, I had to stay with her pace for pace, yelling wonderfully encouraging things like, "You have to peddle faster if you want to stay balanced!" and "You're doing it, keep going!" and "Aim for the middle of the road!!!"

(Racing with Beatrice.)

And once she got it, it was amazing. There goes my little-big girl riding her bike for the very first time. I knew she felt like she was flying and that made it seem like I was flying, too. Chest-bursting high flying.

Although Maggie flies with much more consternation than most.

She's been practicing everyday and asking to practice when we're not practicing. She rode her bike all the way around Frontenac yesterday while I pushed Beatrice and Obie in the big stroller. She has fallen down several times and she scraped her knee to the tune of two band-aids, but she keeps getting up (albeit wailing) and gets back on her bike. I'm awfully proud. I sent out videos on my phone!

But bike riding isn't the only milestone she's had this week. The night after she first practiced riding she came to me and said, "I really think this tooth is loose." She's been hoping for a loose tooth for at least a year and is often telling me she thinks that one is loose. And this time it actually was! She wiggled it vigorously back and forth all that evening and the next day when she wasn't wiggling it with her fingers, she was pushing it way forward with her top teeth. Then yesterday I asked her if she could twist it around, so she tried that for a while. It didn't take much of that, though, and mere moments later her first little bitty baby tooth was sitting in her hand. She didn't even cry! I was amazed.

(Taking a Congratulations Phone Call from her Aunt. A very young-lady thing to do.)

It's only been a month since she turned seven, but so much has already happened. I think I have to stop calling her a little girl now.

Maybe she'll even grow...