{"id":1639,"date":"2010-10-20T10:17:54","date_gmt":"2010-10-20T17:17:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/?p=1639"},"modified":"2010-10-20T10:17:54","modified_gmt":"2010-10-20T17:17:54","slug":"chickens-part-three","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/?p=1639","title":{"rendered":"Chickens Part Three"},"content":{"rendered":"

So those of you who’ve followed this blog have read of my unusual city-girl version of my farm raising.\u00a0 You read about the hysterical mail order delivery of 100 live baby chicks and the ensuing medical insanity that followed after. <\/strong><\/p>\n

But what you may not realize during this time was my mother and father were working full time.\u00a0 And almost NONE of our neighbors had chickens in the back yard.\u00a0\u00a0 To me, as a child, we were different, unique, odd.\u00a0 [A philosophy I’ve learned to love, embrace, waive about like a flag!]\u00a0 But we were, who we were and that was life.<\/strong><\/p>\n

And death.\u00a0 I learned a lot about death growing up with our little mini-farm in the back yard.\u00a0 Because once the surviving chicks grew and matured and laid eggs and hatched them and THOSE chicks grew and matured my mother realized we didn’t need THIS many roosters.\u00a0 One or two were enough for reproduction purposes.\u00a0 So once a chick matured and crowed, he was doomed.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Now, those of you who know my mother professionally may be shocked to think of her as a chicken butcher.\u00a0 My\u00a0 mother is a fantastic Nurse Practitioner in Pediatrics.\u00a0 She has a way with babies that is just amazing to watch, especially in the way she handles them.\u00a0 Her approach to her work and babies is gentle and nurturing.\u00a0 She diagnoses things in newborns that others won’t have a clue about for years until the symptoms are really apparent in the child.\u00a0 It’s her gift, and I’m quite proud of her.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But as a child I watched her butcher the young crowing chickens.\u00a0 She spent many a summer on a farm and was familiar with it.\u00a0 Yet, sadly we didn’t have any of the basic (much less modern) accouterments that should come with chicken butchering.\u00a0 So we watcher my mother “make do”.\u00a0 Something we watched her do a lot of in my childhood, actually.<\/strong><\/p>\n

She’d wring their necks as best she could and then cut off the heads with kitchen scissors and we’d all stand back as the body convulsed around the yard.\u00a0 That was about as much as I could take and went into the house!\u00a0 But I do remember when I got older I was roped (ordered, coerced, bribed..whatever) into “helping.”\u00a0 Luckily, by that time, we’d managed to get a hold of a large tree stump.\u00a0 With the strategic placement of two nails as sort of a neck guide we’d graduated into “axe chopping” off of chicken heads.\u00a0\u00a0 I sucked at that part (yay!) so I was delegated into feather plucking status. <\/strong><\/p>\n

My job was to take a dead chicken by the feet, once flopping was over (gak!) and dunk it into hot water and then cold water to loosen the feathers.\u00a0 Then I was to pluck it clean and hand it over for the next step in making this thing dinner.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I didn’t have a problem with the concept.\u00a0 I’m very much NOT a vegetarian and I know where our meat comes from.\u00a0 And since I’ve always liked cleaning things, seeing the progress of the feathers coming off, I had no problem doing the job.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Isn’t it amusing, though.\u00a0 The things we did as children, or experienced in childhood, or did as parents, (or did in a drunken state as adults!) they might come as such a surprise to many who know us.\u00a0 Everyone truly has a million stories if they just look.\u00a0 It’s the reason I DON’T strive to give my children a “perfect” childhood.\u00a0 I want them to have a few stories of being different and unique.\u00a0 I want them to both hate and enjoy their childhood, so I give them a mixture.<\/strong><\/p>\n

After all, they’re going to go through the “I hate my parents” stage anyway.\u00a0 Might as well live up to the hype!<\/strong><\/p>\n


\n<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So those of you who’ve followed this blog have read of my unusual city-girl version of my farm raising.\u00a0 You read about the hysterical mail order delivery of 100 live baby chicks and the ensuing medical insanity that followed after. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-joy-of-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1639"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1639\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3253,"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1639\/revisions\/3253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heatherbarton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}