Her luck ran out

Well, our very favorite chicken Marshmallow, Cheddar Cheese or Piper, depending on who you ask... finally ran out of luck. =( Last week, the kids opened up the coop somehow without my knowing and when we got home we found her, along with our black chicken, dead in our yard. Well, the black chicken was dead, she was injured pretty badly and poor Tony had to kill her. It was very sad. I saw our brown chicken running around out there, and Jacie was chasing it. I ran out there and saved it, but it was too late for the other two. Chicken keeping has been much more difficult than I anticipated. So far, I think we have bought 8 chickens and now have one left. We have not seen an egg yet. This was really not how it was supposed to work out. I really just wanted to give our brown chicken away before she too was a sad statistic of the Congdon chicken massacre. However, Tony really likes keeping them and since he is never discouraged by these types of things, he decided we would work on fencing that area off better and he came home with 6 more adorable babies. I have been encouraged by how well the kids have handled it. I was very worried that they would realize that they were the ones who opened the gate and get very upset. Death is a fact of life that I don't want to shelter them from. However, I don't want them to value life so little, that they just shrug their shoulders and say, "oh well, we can just buy some more." Even though they are just two dollars, they are each little lives that we have stewardship over... so far we have not done very well. Anyway, we are working on improving our "defenses" against Jacie the killer canine. I hope that the kids are learning something through all of this, I certainly am. Our sweet white chicken, whatever you want to call her, will be missed. She was our first one and we were very surprised how taken with her we all were. After all, she was just a chicken... but she was a pretty cool one.

*Disclaimer: we do not believe in "Luck", but it seemed to be an appropriate title. =)