As my family prepares to welcome our second son into the world, I will be taking a hiatus from creating more complex artwork and blog-posting. In the meantime, please enjoy this awkward conversation I had recently with some grandparents at a local playground!
It takes all types, I guess…
This 100% happened last week.
Before you have kids, you think to yourself about how your kid would never whine, scream, freak out, or shout–I’m here to tell you that anything can and will happen with a toddler, including a simultaneous obsession and fear over cows. Yep, he still loves his little toy farm set cows, even after this incident!
I think he’ll stick with the smaller, plastic kind of bovine for now…
And thus ends the months-long Chicken Saga comic! Thanks so much for staying tuned through thick, thin, and the holiday season. Although this tale has been a bit embellished (ok…maybe quite embellished), the story is real: One day I got a weird note from a neighbor in my mailbox claiming they had one of our chickens in the yard! Since we had no missing chickens, I was convinced they were hallucinating, or at least mistaking an unnaturally large mourning dove for a chicken in their bushes.
Sure enough, it was indeed a runaway chicken, they did indeed name her Dolly and yes, I did make Malcolm go and grab her after his work and classes in the middle of the night!
We were a bit unsure of how Dolly would fare at first. (This is partly why this story took so long to illustrate–I didn’t know how things would turn out and I was pretty much making these comics up on the fly.) For a little while, she wasn’t really doing that well. She had clearly lost a lot of weight during her wanderings and was extremely stressed and losing so many feathers the chicken coop looked like a ripped pillowcase for several weeks. She refused to eat, we weren’t sure how much she was drinking (if at all) and she had an injured beak, to boot. She spent most days wedged up on a high roost we made for her.
Slowly but surely her hunger and curiosity got the best of her, and the rest of the flock took to her quite well, all things considered. There were a few pecking-order skirmishes, but nothing other than the usual fowl brawl that happens now and again.
Now, I am happy to say that Dolly has gained back her lost weight and re-grown her feathers, which are coming in silky, cream-white, and fluffy! Even better? She is actually laying beautiful blue-green eggs in the middle of winter!
We love our Dolly, and I am so glad you, dear reader, could take part in this saga with us.
Some things are too hard to resist.
Betcha didn’t know chickens could recite poetry, eh?
My husband is the champion chicken-catcher, I am convinced of this.
Happy New Year to everyone!
I used to dislike New Years. Being such a Christmas fanatic, the New Years holiday seemed more like an anti-climactic ending to such a festive time of year–like Christmas’s sad, ugly, forgotten cousin who had a birthday that everyone felt they needed to begrudgingly acknowledge–than a real cause for celebration.
But, in the past several years, I have grown to increasingly love New Years because it is a holiday that is filled to the brim with hope. It’s the holiday of endless possibilities: you can sit down and list out all of the things you’d like to do or aspire to in the next year, no matter how wild the ideas are that cross your mind, AND you have 365 days to do all of those things! Not a week! Not a month! An entire year. There is no rush, no limits, and my daydreamer self loves that concept.
Here is to a happy, healthy New Year for everyone.
He really did go out there late at night in his work clothes to catch a chicken.
Happy Almost-New-Year, folks!
After a nice holiday hiatus, the Chicken Saga is back in full force, as promised. Stay tuned to find out what happens to Dolly, the runaway chicken, plus many more (hopefully new and exciting) posts to come!
Twitter is dead: #boomersonsocial
Long Days Drawn Out 