Tiny Toons and other Crazies

So, since we're moving, we decided it was time to downsize our "farm". The people that gave us the goat took him back along with 2 turkeys. Their neighbors (some other friends of ours) bought 5 chickens (although at the time, it was an undisclosed amount of chickens they'd be taking...more on this later in the post). A while back, we brought home a cat that needed a home...he was going to be Tyler's kitty. Our existing cats did not appreciate his presence here. After a while, they tolerated each other. Soon, we sent the girls off to get spayed...while they were gone, Junior roamed the house and thoroughly enjoyed not being bullied by the girls. When they came home, however, he was now ruler of the roost and they didn't like it one bit...all fights were back on and truces were called off. We decided it was time to send him back to where we got him (she said to bring him back if it didn't work out). I felt bad because he was such a loving kitty and would have been perfect for Tyler (too fat for him to pick up and maul!) I jokingly asked Chris if we should get him a hamster or something and let it run around the house in one of those little balls. Instantly an old commercial came to mind. Do you remember the anti-drug campaign that was going on in the 90's?

"This is your brain." (they show an uncooked egg in a jar)
"This is your brain on drugs." (they shake the bottle violently, causing the egg to break open and scramble instantly)
"Any questions?" (they would then set the jar down and flash some information on the screen...I never did really take the time to read that)

Now, think of the cartoon Tiny Toons...imagine that little character named Elmira. She would LOVE those animals until they all went insane and tried to escape her overly loving antics. This is how almost all our animals are with Tyler. I feel rather bad for him watching this but can't help but think of how they must feel. Now let's go back to the hamster in a ball. Now that I've told you of these two specific things (the commercial and Elmira), I can't see that the hamster would last too long in Tyler's care. It'd probably end up like that egg on the commercials...we'd have a majorly handicapped hamster by the end of the day, I'm sure! So, we decided against getting him a pet anytime soon!

This morning, I got woken up by kids coming in, coughing, complaining about ears hurting, sniffles, the whole works. Didn't we just go through this a couple weeks ago? I'm fairly certain we did...but maybe I'm just losing it here! I started practicing my "witch-doctory" on them and I'm hoping this all works so we don't need to go to the doctor this time. I also had to call the Girl Scouts and tell them Terra wouldn't be participating in today's activity. We got up and got kids breakfast and got ourselves dressed.

Chris went out to feed and water the animals and noticed feathers ALL over the yard and chicken coop. He then noticed a couple of carcasses in the outer pen. Then he started to explore and count how many were missing...keeping in mind that the friends I'd mentioned above were coming by today to pick out which chickens and how many of them they wanted. He counted 10 left, which means that around 5 were gone. There is one in particular that I was rather sad was missing. We'd nicknamed him "Midget". He was one of our hatch-lings that we hatched in our incubator. There are others that are the same age as he is...and he's a quarter of their size (actually, its a "she" but we can't seem to stop calling it "he"). We wanted to keep her and see what kind of eggs she'd lay (if any) and how big she'd get. She's one of the ones missing. While surveying the damage, our friends showed up so we gave them 5 hens and kept the remaining 5 chickens (1 rooster and 4 hens). Miraculously, the ducks and geese were untouched. Stupid foxes. We found paw prints all over out there and there's a hole in the fence they made bigger. The hole was patched up and repaired and the outer pen was closed off to the animals. We herded them to the coop area and closed the gates. We're kind of hoping that a couple of the chickens are just bunked down somewhere and will come out of hiding, but we're not holding our breath.

All this and the day isn't even halfway over yet!! But, on a positive note...that chicken feed we bought yesterday...it'll last a LOT longer than we'd anticipated at first!