Took my dog for a two hour walk with my mom and her dogs. She’s tired AF because she’s 11 years old but she’s stoked and happy and having the deepest happiest snooze.

Well, they’re all okay, mostly.

Big bird is his usual cantankerous but strangely affectionate self, particularly as regards shoes.

Volunteer bird has managed to get herself stranded outside the yard, but seems to be healthy, and since she’s never willing to let you handle her, there’s nothing we can do about it.

My baby girl though, she’s a sassy mess lol.

She had me scared a few nights ago she was having trouble laying, which isn’t exactly a rare thing for chickens. But she was definitely stressed out, and straining.

Well, at one point, she’s straining, and yellow liquid comes out of her, so my immediate thought was “oh fuck” because that could have been yolk, which meant the egg had broken inside her. So I’m freaking out since the emergency vet is an hour away, and staffed by an absolute asshole, and the regular vet we have was closed by that time.

Being egg bound is bad enough, and can kill a bird, but if the egg breaks, it’s even worse.

She’s fine, obviously, but I was a wreck at first, and then for a while after she finally got the egg out. Which she did while I was running around, making calls, and hoping I could get her somewhere in time.

The yellow goo was just poo squeezing around the egg.

I come back into the room after failing to get ahold of anyone, ready to just grab her and go.

She’s rolling the egg around, pecking at it, and scolding it. Brrrrraaaawk-brawk-brawk! She was all het up and mad at the damn thing. But, when I scooped it up, then scooped her up, trying not to cry, she went all adorable after the initial gobbling noise of surprise at the sudden pickup.

So, I sat down and cried all over her while my back was spasming from all the abuse I had just put it through. She got sick of it after a minute or two, but was still kinda fascinated by the noises I was making. Which was alternating between grunts and suppressed screams of pain and sobbing.

Folks, I love that bird.

Back a little over two years ago, I had to put my dog to sleep after fifteen years of the purest unconditional love I’ve ever known. Then, while she wasn’t exactly bonded with me, my kid’s cat died suddenly.

I was done with pets. I can’t take losing them any more.

When we took in the little “hen” that turned out to be a rooster, the only reason I agreed to it was that it was a dang chicken. It’d be outside, I wouldn’t have anything to do with other than food and such. That hen was actually a rooster, but still. Growing up, the chickens I was around were dumber than dammit, and didn’t care about people as long as the food kept coming.

And then, with the rescue rooster, we discover that chickens need other chickens. So we got the last chicken a guy had. But it was very young, and couldn’t stay outside at night. It’s feathers weren’t ready. Some days the temp was too low to go out at all.

So, now I’ve got this little ball of fluff nesting in my beard making pew-pew noises, purring and trilling.

Then she gets too big for the beard (in her mind; I’d be fine with it), and she’s outside all day, but she’s part of us now and comes inside at night since the rooster sleeps in the window, and volunteer hen in some trees.

And I’m over here, with this amazing little thing that I love, and terrified she’s going to die because an egg got stuck, the very kind of thing I didn’t ever want to go through again. And I don’t regret a single fucking second of that fear, or even the pain I’m going to go through eventually, because our little feathered void with a raspberry beret on loves me, and I love her. I love the other ones too, dammit. But she’s my baby.

Gods, chickens! How the hell was I supposed to know chickens would be like this? The ones running all over my uncle’s farm weren’t like this.

But, here we are, and these little velociraptors are part of the family. Now I’m going to go hug my rooster. It’ll annoy him a little, but he won’t run away either.