our latest adventure...

Let me preface this post by saying that my husband's spirit of adventure was one of the reasons I married him. I love him for it, though it has gotten us into trouble more than once. Today might be one of those off days when I could have lived with a little less adventure and a little more normal.

After a sleepless night with our daughter, I awoke to find my husband missing from the bed. Waking up slowly, I stumbled out for some coffee and expected to see him in the kitchen reading, or watching t.v. The house was empty. Glancing out the kitchen window hoping to catch a glimpse of him, I had to rub my eyes and pinch myself. Might I still be asleep? Out the window, not 20 yards from our house, were hundreds, possibly one thousand, chickens. No exaggeration.

Amidst the hundreds of brown and white birds, pecking on the ground, climbing on the wood pile, running around under our cars, was my husband making a futile attempt to herd them away from the house. Stopping in the middle of a pack of chickens that seemed to have no fear of him, he looked up and saw me in the window, staring wide-eyed in my bathrobe. We were both thinking the exact same thing: "What did we get ourselves into??!" And in that moment as we stared at each other through the window, we both began to laugh. A deep belly-aching, side-splitting, tear-inducing hysterical laugh. It was the kind of laugh that comes out when you are not sure if you should laugh or cry, so you attempt to do both at the same time.






Life is an adventure. We have a choice to fight it, or laugh at it, however unexpected the situation.

The arrival of these chickens was not completely unannounced, though in my sleepy state I had completely erased any knowledge of the birds. We have been planning to rent our land out to some free-ranging organic chicken farmers who will also be moving into the cottage on the property. The chickens will be penned in different areas of the agricultural land. However, moving day this morning happened to be one of those mornings when things just did not go as planned. In the wee hours of the morning while it was just beginning to grow light, the chicken trailers arrived and got stuck in the mud. Somehow, the chickens began to escape out of cracks in the doors on the trailer. They came pouring out, one after another, and made a bee line for the greenery around our house. These animals are impossible to herd - it is hard to explain, but after trying it multiple times, I understood why the chickens were everywhere.

Oh, and the electricity was out all morning due to a motor vehicle accident. And we have ants all over our Christmas tree. Some days are full of the unexpected. We can try our hardest to stay within a plan, within certain boundaries of expectation, but when life takes over, sometimes we just have to laugh.

P.S. All of these pictures were taken after the majority of the problem was managed. Imagine 4 times the chickens when I first looked out the window. These are the straggler birds that were exceptionally evasive when it came to herding them back to their pen.