The Best Day And The Worst Day

Warning.  

This is not for the squeamish or faint hearted.  If you are looking for something beautiful and inspirational to read while you sip your tea, you've come to the wrong place.  In fact this is full of blood shed and heart ache and may change your eating habits forever.  

Well it turned out to be an exciting morning.  We've been building up to this for some time now.  TaeKwonDo testing!  Jess testing for his black belt.  Nate testing for mid term to black belt and my other black belts mid terming toward their 2nd degree.  So y'all, it was a big deal. 

Ready to test!  I was most concerned about Jess and Nate this time.  Last cycle neither of them broke their boards and it would just be pure sadness if it happened again.  

But NO!!  And just look how handsome he is in BLACK!! 

I don't have all my pictures ready to show you the action but suffice it to say it was a lot of wood breaking and a lot of screaming and yelling and hugging. 

And Nate.  He's a littler guy in our set and I've been hoping that he's grown stronger since last testing cycle.  And sure enough...WHACK!  BAM!  CRACK!  All three broke!!  

And it was a good morning.

~~~

But now the scene changes.  And this is where you might wanna dial a different number because its fixing to get horrible.  

We have these roosters, see.  Five of them to be exact.  And they are constantly crowing at all times of the day.  If that wasn't bad enough, they have also turned mean all of a sudden and the little kids are scared to even go into the chicken pen.  

The time had come to harvest some chickens and bring some peace to the neighborhood.

Honey had been watching videos all week on how to do it.  And if you talk to anybody over the age of 65 they have a story about it and an opinion of how to do it right.

All week FarmerBoy had been talking about it and even asked if he could keep a chicken head to make a necklace out of.

Y'all.
There are no words.

~~~

I suppose no matter how many homemade videos you watch, it's gonna be different when the time comes.  

So after shutting every blind in the house, LB and I busied ourselves in the kitchen to pass the time until it was done.  Because while I was ok with harvesting our chickens, I didn't want any part of it myself and gave strict orders that there were to be no feathers, heads, feet, or guts of any type that would pass the threshold of my house.  And I had it in my mind that it would be a quick deal and my man would come in with nice clean chicken meat.  Everyone would be smiling.  And life would go on.  

But no.  And it didn't take long before I had people coming in asking for different things and switching out knives and giving a report.  Something about it not being quick enough.  

And that's when everything took a turn for the worse.  And I started thinking that our sweet baby chick that I held and loved on and fed kitchen scraps to was suffering and hurting and it was all our fault.   Why was I so impatient with the noise?  What could we have done differently that might have kept him from being so mean?  Why did it have to come to this?? 

But I tried to keep on working.  And LB just kept on singing as she worked and it reminded me of the verse about the guy that sings songs to a heavy heart and I really desperately wanted her to stop but I didn't have the heart to ask her because she's so sweet and I didn't want her to think that I was having second thoughts or was worried about Midnight.  

And just so you know.  It is the stupidest thing in the world to name your chickens.  So don't do it. 

Hours later.  And I do mean hours.  Lane and Josh came in with big smiles and a naked chicken.   Lane gave me every detail she could remember as she worked on it some more in the sink.   I couldn't touch it.  And I was glad it was bedtime.  So I had Lane cook it and I had no part of it at all.  

I got the boys to bed,  and went in a few minutes later to let FarmerBoy give me his version of it because I knew he'd wanna talk.  More details, and he thought it went pretty well but had some good ideas of what to do differently next time.

Then....  He says "The only bad part was the feelings."
Me:  What do you mean?

And he broke!  And said how he felt bad for having to do it and melted in my arms.

Oh y'all....!

His daddy came in and told him how proud we were and what a good job he did and just sat with him for awhile.  And I went into my bathroom and cried  bawled.   And felt like throwing up.

~~~

Never again.

We have 4 more roosters that are free to a good home and from now on we will buy our chicken at Walmart like normal people.   Packaged nicely on a styrofoam tray from a random stranger chicken that I never held and loved on.  Or we will simply never eat chicken again.  It's up in the air.