Hurt me Rhonda

Last week Rhonda took a peck at Davies. It was fairly small and we dealt with it straight away by both setting Scarlett on her (she shouts as those chickens in a truly menacing fashion :lol:) and Davies went and picked her up. I’ve read that all the humans and other animals who live with chickens assume a place within their pecking order too and the trick is to ensure that all humans remain above all chickens regardless of the chicken pecking order which is the chief reason we encourage the children to spend so much time with the chickens and let them pick them up and cart them around etc. They are 17 weeks old tomorrow and point of lay is from 18 weeks onwards. But twice over the weekend Rhonda went for Ady, once she caught him really badly down one arm. He’s done all the picking her up, ruffling her feathers etc. but on the basis that we can’t possibly keep animals in our garden which could hurt any of us, specifically our own or other people’s visiting children we’re trying to determine whether we can behaviour manage it out of her, we simply get shot of her or whether the children could cope with the idea of seeing chicken keeping through to the logical (Goddard 😉 ) conclusion. I am definitely over my ‘I couldn’t eat a pet’ phase and reckon I could cope with a bit of roasted Rhonda with cranberry sauce but Davies and Scarlett are a bit less keen.

So I went on my US chicken forum to get some hints and tips for keeping your chickens in line and posted some pictures of them, only to get six replies saying they think they are four roosters :(. We’ve still had no crowing which would seem very unusual and I’m thinking they’d probably be more aggressive if they were four roos and would have more rowing among themselves, although I guess if there are no hens to be fighting over they may be a bit less inclined. I guess we give them another 4 weeks or so and wait for eggs or crowing but the chicken drama continues apace here anyway.

In other non-chicken related news this morning was filled with not very exciting things like doing loads and loads of washing, watching some tv with the children and then sitting and ready a HUGE pile of library books that I wanted to take back. So we had all sorts of stories and reference books including a great one about weather – 100 things you should know about weather which we flicked through and picked out the best bits on but included chatter about seasons, the equator, 24 hours of daylight / darkness in some places, different colours of lightning, tornados and hurricanes, different types of clouds, desiduous and evergreen trees and why leaves turn brown before they die and fall, meteorites and more. We read another one of the wonderful ‘Let’s Talk’ series, this time on girls, boys, babies, bodies, families and friends which they both listened to very closely so I imagine will trigger questions sometime soon. Oh and inbetween all the usual picture story books we also read the book I’d seen Bob recommend somewhere Beginnings and Endings with Lifetimes between, which was lovely. We let reading aloud slip here way too often so it’s been nice to do quite a lot of it the last few days.

We’d planned to see Lucy and The Rs in the afternoon for an hour or so but as I was hanging out the next load of washing before making lunch Lucy rang to say they were home and would we like to go there for lunch so we did that instead. There were various games including drawing and I showed Scarlett how most things can be drawn using basic shapes (square, rectangle, circle, triangle) and then adding in detail by drawing a pig for her using a rectangle and triangle and then filling in lines to add proper shape. She liked that idea so next we drew a robot using squares and then a quick picture of the garden with all sorts of shapes and angles. Davies coloured in a robot I’d drawn and written ‘robot’ above and added ‘Nic & Davies’ to it :). On the way to Lucy’s we’d been listening to Phil Collins very loud as the children love the Cadburys Gorilla advert at the moment so he also drew a gorilla and drum kit too :lol:.

We came home again for an hour’s quiet before swimming and Davies and Scarlett played with their cube worlds for ages. We then had a very tiresome hunt the goggles episode having tracked down the swimming bag and got Davies into his trunks and dressed again over the top. Particularly tiresome as they’d been on the lounge floor just last night and I recall pointing to them and saying ‘they need to be put somewhere safe otherwise we’ll be running round tomorrow searching for them’ 🙄 🙄 🙄 Managed to buy a pair there for four quid which was less than I’d dreaded it might be and as Davies left the pool without his usual red rings round his eyes from his goggles and raved about how much more comfortable they were I suppose was £4 well spent. Bet the others turn up tomorrow though.

Swimming was good. Yet another teacher again but older and better with the children. Encouraging but taking no nonsense and hooked up to a microphone so they could all hear her ok. Davies demonstrated his complete lack of grace, style or technique but also his water confidence and joy at being there which more than compensated. There were several littler children there (they can start at 5) so he didn’t particularly stand out. Did discover we’d actually missed the first week back last week which was very annoying. Beavers started this week so I assumed everything did without properly checking. Whereas Badgers is the other extreme where we were told at the end of summer term we’d get a letter with dates etc and we’ve still not heard anything despite me assuming it restarts tomorrow – will ring tomorrow and check.

Home again to drop Davies off to be fed (Ady and Scarlett had stayed home) and ready for bed and I went back out to the library to an author talk event for reading group. It was Sue Walker, who’s book The Reckoning I’d read (ages ago now actually). While we were all still arriving and gathering I struck up a conversation with Rose, a teacher who comes along and was asking her about SATS, National Curriculum and so on (she teaches Y6 and Y8 this year). Probably inevitably once the direct conversation about school started up she asked where mine went and I answered. By now all the other book group folk, including Sue Walker had assembled and were listening and asking questions. So I am well and truly outed there 😆 We started what looked like it might be an interesting but lengthy conversation which we agreed we’d come back to another time and got on with the author event. It was really good, Sue was an excellent speaker with loads of interesting stuff to talk about and it didn’t finish til long gone 9pm (starting at 7). Really enjoyable and so nice to meet the person responsible for creating something I’d enjoyed reading.

I probably have loads more to say but I’m very tired and have various things to get done tomorrow so I’m off to bed. I know I need to hone myself ready for question time next book group though, it’ll be an interesting one no doubt ;).