Imagine for a moment that you receive a box in the mail full of 47 two-day-old babies and your job is to keep them alive. These babies can already walk yet are nowhere near smart enough to walk in the right directions. They have had nothing to eat or drink since birth, and if you do not teach them to drink by shoving each of their cute little faces into a bowl of water, they will die of dehydration. Failure at your new mothering job will result in them eating each other and/or smothering each other to death by piling on top of each other. As disgusting as they sound, they are so darn cute you find yourself talking to them in a silly voice using embarrassing sticky-sweet baby language. And when two of them do not seem to be doing very well, you stick them in the gap between your boobs to warm them up without even thinking twice about it. You then carry them around with you like that singing to them until they perk up enough to be fed water through a medicine dropper.
Of course I'm talking about chickens, here. (What gave it away - the pictures perhaps? Or maybe the fact that even I could not fit two human children between my boobs...?) Anyhow, humor me a bit more and imagine that you are so stressed out about losing one of these babies, especially the two you have nursed back to health, that you check on them every hour. You crouch down in the sawdust, make sure they have been drinking, and unpile them from on top of each other. (There is a lot more embarrassing sticky-sweet baby talk here.) Those who are pecking each other's feet you move towards the food and coax them to peck the food rather than their brothers and sisters. You dry off the ones that have fallen bodily into the water and feel the foot temperature of your two invalids. Satisfied that they will survive for the next hour, you return home, TO YOUR REAL CHILDREN. You clean something, read some books to people, change diapers, vacuum sawdust off the carpet, then realize it is time to check on the chicks again.Perhaps you are getting the feel of how this day is going for us... oops - time to check the chicks!
2 comments:
Wow, now that's a lot of chicks...you're gonna need to market your future egg business a little better...or your gonna be drowning in eggs!!! Totally adorable by the way...especially the one between the boobs. I could totally see myself doing that...then thinking "what am i doing?" :)
How cute! I will have to show my 1st grader your photos. His class has been studing chicks for over a month and have eggs that should be hatching any day. Every day he comes home with the latest egg-casuality story but 2 seem to be holding on!
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