Why Chickens?
In my first month of being a SAHM, I decided that we needed chickens. Yes . . . chickens! Thankfully, my husband usually goes along with my crazy ideas, but I’m pretty sure he thought I was completely nuts with this one. However, he ordered us eleven Barred Plymouth Rock chickens (cute ones) and they arrived in the mail a few weeks later. When we went to pick them up at the post office and I could hear them chirping in the back, I thought to myself, “what on earth have we done?” They arrived in a tiny cardboard box with little holes poked through so they could breathe. I anticipated that a few of the chicks would not survive the USPS trek from OK to TN. I then wondered if it was too soon to teach my children about death at ages one and two and envisioned having a funeral in the backyard for the chicks that didn’t make it. Thank goodness all survived the trip. We opened the box and they were adorable! One of the chicks startled Charlie while she was holding her and she launched it across the room. Can you imagine being a little chick surviving the trip from OK to then be tossed across the room by a one-year-old, sigh.
Although I may not appear to be the “chicken mom” type, my education was in agricultural economics and my first job was working for Farm Credit. We financed chicken barns and I quickly realized how disgusting they were. The average chicken barn holds more than 20,000 chickens that stand body-to-body and have no room to move around. When one of them gets sick or dies, the others around it follow suit quickly. They pump them full of antibiotics to prevent sickness and quickly wiping out an entire crop of chickens. Let me be clear, I am no animal activist, and we consume a lot of chicken in our home. However, you cannot unsee that type of thing, and you realize what you are consuming is gross and not “healthy.” As you can imagine, the egg industry isn’t much better (or any other commercialized livestock sector in our nation). We eat a ton of eggs because they are nutrient-dense, an excellent source of protein, easy to prepare, and cheap. Therefore, since we had the time, resources, and interest to do it ourselves, seems like a reasonable endeavor to undertake, right?
Additionally, parents in our culture are raising spoiled brats that believe the world revolves around them and everyone is here to serve or entertain them. From my experience, the best way to “get over yourself” is to focus your time and energy on someone else. My children are too young to turn loose and tell them to go volunteer, but they are not too young to learn how to take care of animals. My son can be a spoiled brat and it’s time to change that. I take full responsibility for his bratty behavior because I have sometimes taken “the easy way out” with parenting when I was working full-time. Parents can be exhausted at the end of the day and it’s easier to put on a show or hand children a device than it is to put in the hard work and actually teach them something that will serve them well in life.
So, when I go outside to take care of the chickens, the kids go with me. Sometimes Mac whines and complains, but he is starting to understand that the chickens rely on us for food, water, and shelter. We have been doing it for eight weeks now and he’s starting to enjoy it. It also gets us outdoors every day regardless of the elements and then we typically end up playing outside. Another added benefit has been that Luke has gotten into it too and we’re learning new skills. It’s been very therapeutic to be outdoors working with our hands and spending time together. Becoming a mother is how God really got my attention and is teaching me that the world does not revolve around me. I have to wake up and take care of my kids every day regardless of how I feel or what I want. If the chickens can be that on a much smaller scale for my children and they learn a valuable lesson regarding putting someone else’s needs above their own, then being a weird chicken mom is worth it for me. And we’ll get some free-range eggs out of it too!