It's a Trap!

As you may remember, I spent the length of my summer off, battling critters far and wide in our little piece of home at the edge of the woods. It was a tough summer on my sanity.

The chickens really caught my imagination and I tried to figure out exactly how the eggs that I would find would be getting fertilized. I spent the summer trying to understand the workings of chicken sex.

I went to my neighbor, Farmer Brown, during the summer and let him know that his chickens had indeed been living at my house, roosting in my dogwood tree, and laying eggs in nests around the yard, under the porch, and a rather unsuccessful attempt next to the trash can.

The bear, of course, trampled all over the eggs in the nest in an attempt to open the trash can (which Z pronounces crash tan and every time I type it, I here her saying it in my head over and over).

My sanity this summer was held fast only by one very thin line of fishing wire, I suppose.

Farmer Brown shrugged off all of this information and said that "When it gets cold, they'll come on home. I don't feed them in the spring and summer, they can find their own food." I thought this an odd statement but went about my merry way, thinking that sometime in the winter the chickens would indeed find their place in this world.

It never got cold this winter. I now understand chicken sex. I get to see it every morning.  The chickens live in my yard, they roost in my tree, they eat the vegetables and table scraps that I throw out for them (although I will not put chicken out there for them, that would be wrong). Chickens eat every type of food, which I didn't know before.

They still lay eggs all around the yard, although they are getting craftier with where they build there nests so that the humans will not get too close to them. Neither of the hens are actually nesting right now, I guess that it may be too dangerous to nest on the ground or too cold in the chill of the night air.

Z hates the chickens. Really hates the chickens. She builds traps and mazes for the chickens so that she can "set them on fire and eat them for dinner". I may be raising a sociopath (or psychopath? How do you know?).

The chickens are not the only things that Z builds traps for. Upon learning that Blade and A got money from the tooth fairy for their teeth, she has been trying to build a trap in anticipation for the day (a few years from now) that she will lose her tooth. She knows that the tooth fairy brings money for teeth and she has decided to keep her so that no other children will be able to get the money.

And now you know the real reason that we never have guests over. People that enter, seldom leave.