Hillary Rodham Cluckin

We are now the proud owners of 52 chickens but I still have to buy eggs from my neighbor.  I am thinking about starting a chicken non-profit that will be named something like, Patriot Chicken or Chicky Tea Party.  I could dress the chickens up in little outfits and serve them tea; something I am already known for doing.  People could come too and give a tax deductible donation.  I am really doubting I will get any flack from the IRS at this point.  I bet I could just send out a quick email to them letting them know of my intentions and they will waive all paperwork to avoid looking like they were targeting conservative chickens.

Two shipments of baby chicks have arrived. It is really crazy that these little creatures are sent through the US Postal Service a day after they are hatched but that is how they came.  They sent two extra with each shipment.  I am assuming this is because there are usually a couple that don't survive the two to three day journey.  We did lose a couple but not without a fight.  The husband had one wrapped up in his sweatshirt feeding it water from an eye dropper while he was watching TV, but the poor little thing didn't make it through the night.  I stayed up to check on her until she finally died around midnight.  It is kind of crazy that we spent that much time and attention on a bird we planned on eating in a couple of months, but is was still sad to see her fade away.

We have told the boys which birds are for eggs and which are for meat and made them promise not to play with or name the meat birds because that will make for a very sad roast chicken dinner.  Here is the breakdown:

Faverolles are a favorite meat bird in France and I saw many a headless one in the butcher shops of Paris hanging by its scrawny legs.  The roosters are spectacularly beautiful and we will be giving a few of them a Presidential pardon in order to keep producing more birds so we don't have to do the shipping thing again.  Poor Kyle the Rooster is going to feel even more inadequate when he gets a load of his Favoerolle counterpart.

Speckled Sussex are also a meaty bird.  I feel a little guilty about these ones since one of our original layers is a Speckled Sussex and she may get a little nervous that her number is about to be up.

Cuckoo Marans lay these crazy brown eggs that look like chocolate Easter eggs.

Golden Comets and Black Australorps are docile girls who are reliable layers of your standard brown egg.

I was hoping to also get some Aruacanas. They lay beautiful blue eggs, but we couldn't find any.  My awesomeness cache would definitely go up a couple of notches if I could send my city visitors home with a dozen rainbow colored eggs.

The husband really has done a spectacular job with the chicken house for the layers and the new chicken tractor for the meat birds.  Unlike the Trump Tower he built last summer, the new one is more spacious, easier to move so the chickens can have new pasture every day and a big door so you can actually get into the coop; all at a fraction of the cost of the previous tractor.

The chicks are really cute, but luckily we have the kittens to fill our need for ridiculous cuteness so hopefully there will not be a boycott of our clean pasture raised chickens in favor of factory birds.

Even though we will not be naming the meat birds, I feel an overwhelming urge to name all the layers.  I have a thing for giving all of our animals a name which we never use because they also have a nickname.  I am going for a powerful women theme.  So far I have:

Hillary Rodham Cluckin
Joan of Eggs
Susan B Layer
Emma Goldegg
Eleanor Roosecluck
Martha Stewmeat (I know that is a meat reference but...)
Mother Therbeaker
Dorothy Pecker
Edith Waddleton

You get the gist.  Unfortunately there are only so many bad puns you can come up with using, egg, beak and cluck.  I need some help. There are twelve more girls to name  Please send me your ideas.

Mother's Day

I am sure Mother's Day is going to be an over done topic on the blogosphere this week and I really was trying to come up with a different topic to write about, but I couldn't, so here is post number 5,672 about this magical day which leaves most of us a little disappointed.

There was a time in the not so distant past that what I wanted more than anything for Mother's Day was to wake up after a restful 9 hours of sleep to a beautifully clean home with smiling doting children holding bouquets of wildflowers they just picked and homemade cards with heartfelt sentiments about how much they love and appreciate me.  These children would then magically disappear outside for the rest of the day leaving me to watch an entire season of "Sex and the City" and read a grown up book.

Of course, this has never happened in the past 11 years, but now that Prince is a tween who would rather spend his time playing Xbox live with his friends than hanging with his mom, my fantasy of spending time alone has turned to a desperate need to force my kids to spend the day with me.  I am not ready for them to be grown up quite yet.

I definitely had an overwhelming need to always be with my boys when the were infants.  It was painful and innate.  I felt a combination of guilt and relief that I did not have a paying job to go back to right after they were born.

The husband thinks I am over protective and though I really have come a long way since the days when I wouldn't let anyone take baby Prince out for a walk for fear they would push his stroller into an open side walk gate or into oncoming traffic while carelessly navigating the mean streets of Carroll Gardens Brooklyn, I still throw up a little in my mouth whenever Scrappy Doo pumps so hard that the swing bounces at the top, and even though I was very happy that Prince was invited to his first sleep over since moving here, I had to grill him on what he would do if his friend took out a gun. There's quite a few of those up here.

The day James Dean came home from school and told me one of the boys in his class asked him why he was so small, I actually said in my out loud voice, "Tell him it is because you really are supposed to be in 3rd grade and he is supposed to be in 5th."  I tried to swallow the venomous words right after they oozed out of my mouth, but James Dean just looked at me and said, "I told him some people are small and some are big."  Lessons from an 8 year old.

Watching all of the mama animals up here is farm country makes me feel a little less crazy about my own maternal behavior.  You don't mess with a calf if mama cow is loose.  The doe who came charging out of the woods at me when her fawns got a little too close, wasn't being over protective.  She was being a mother.  That is what mothers do: We protect.  Granted, sometimes we may take it to an extreme.  Chasing down a New Jersey driver who seemed to think there is a left on red rule in Manhattan probably wasn't the best idea with then five, three and four month old boys in tow, but the mother monster inside of me didn't care if the guy was five times my size.  He had to see the faces of the kids he nearly took out (probably wasn't that close, but I did have to pull everyone back) and be told to keep his moronic driving skills in his own state.

I am sure my inner mother monster has embarrassed my children countless times.  What is up with New Jersey drivers in New York City?

Itty Bitty Kitty seems to have the same mother monster inside of her.   Athena the big labradordle got a little too close to the kittens the other day and mama released a hissing, spitting, clawing fury that made the poor dog yelp and pee on the floor as she cowered in the corner.  I would have high fived the cat right then but I was a little scared the claws were still out.

It is now 9:00 on Mother's Day morning and I have already had my traditional breakfast in bed.  The husband still hasn't learned that I don't like cheese IN my scrambled eggs; only ON my egg sandwich.  James Dean just woke up and gave me a big hug which was a little tighter and a little longer than usual, which truly is the best Mother's Day present I could ever wish for.

In the very wise words of my bestie's beautiful mom, "Kids need roots and wings."  I am still working on digging the roots down to the Earth's core, but the wings are starting to sprout.

Happy Mother's Day to all those fierce mother monsters out there.

Bad Neighbors

It seems we are now THAT family.  We're not the ones with the broken down cars and inflatable pools... yet. Though there would be an inflatable bouncy amusement park in the backyard if left up to me, the husband hates, "plastic crap."  He becomes incensed when he hears the crackling of shattering plastic when he mows over one of the water guns I secretly purchased at the Dollar Store.  There isn't much that really gets under his skin, like plastic toys.  I even had James Dean bring his father the BJ's flyer featuring a $700 inflatable pool/slide combo. The plan was to have James Dean tell him that I had just purchased it online and then  I was going to get all mad at James Dean for spilling the beans.   We rehearsed the scene a few times and it was pretty perfect.  Unfortunately, when show time came, James choked a bit and the husband didn't take the bait.

So, we are not the family with crap all over their yard, except for the scraps of the toy squirrel the dogs have ripped to shreds which causes me to gasp in horror every time I step on it thinking it is the remains of Baby Bunny. We are the family whose dogs bark maniacally at the geese in the pond at 6 am and whose rooster likes to go up the hill to the neighbors' house to cockadoodledo and poop on their deck.  We are also the neighbors who constantly have tractors running, the father doing chores in his underwear, children screaming  and young heifers roaming the neighborhood.


Friday evening the husband decided to take the boys to see the latest Iron Man movie.  I begged off claiming that we needed to save money or something.  I was going to curl up on the bed to watch "A Little Romance" and have a special mommy dinner: Shiraz.

I was pouring my wine when I heard Pepper barking.  Pepper barks at everything so normally this would not be a big deal but this was a strange bark.  I looked out the window and there was Noelle across the street eating the neighbor's forsythia bush.  I ran out the door and across the street to try and wrangle her back into the barn.  She didn't have her bridle on so I am not sure how I thought I was going to grab her.  I tried wrapping myself around her neck but she shook me off.  I tried herding her but she ran the other way.  I decided to run home and fill up the baby bottle to entice her back.  I dangled the bait in front of her and managed to get her all the way home before she sucked it dry.  A couple of may flies  managed to go up my nose and down my throat but I didn't drop the bottle until I had her shut in the barn.  Getting her into her stall would prove a little more difficult since her milk was all gone, but I finally managed to get her in.  I went in and fell asleep about half way through the movie.

I am not sure what it is about our animals that they are all so ill behaved. We have done a pretty good job so far raising three kids who are reasonably polite, well behaved and manage to stay out of trouble.   I am still on the fence about Scrappy Doo having a run-in with the law when he is older but that will probably be a white collar crime like embezzling money from his televanglism empire.

I think our problem may have something to do with how much we spoil our animals.  The livestock guardian dog has taken to guarding the "barn" kittens because neither the dog nor the cats will ever spend a night outside despite our best intentions.

The husband came in the house the other day with the rooster under his arm.  My inquisitive look was answered with, "I am showing him around."

Noelle wears a cashmere cardigan when it is cold and I am still trying to design a special hat to keep the bugs out of her eyes.

All of these crazy bad critters are part of the farmette family.  The husband would probably argue that he does not consider the dogs to be part of the family, but he does like how Pepper looks out for those kittens.

Thankfully the neighbors have been very understanding so far.  So here are a couple of videos of some of the spoiled critters that fill the popcorn bowl with lots of good memories: