The Chicken House Experience

Summer days are gone....school days are here! It seems like it should be the other way, but I always bake more during the school year than I do in the summer. Anyway, last Friday I had some stuff I needed to bake, so after school I quickly headed to the kitchen.

I have a really bad habit of never gathering my supplies before I bake, and this was one of those times that I just overlooked that part of it. When we spent a week with our friends, the Lindbergs, this past summer, one of the things they taught us was how to bake whole wheat bread. I had been baking the bread for awhile, but they had told us that you can also make breakfast rolls out of the bread dough, and I was excited to try it. Seemed easy enough. Haha, looking back I wouldn't have even tried making them that day if I knew the process it would be.

I began mixing together the dough when I realized we had no eggs in the house. Since we have chickens, I sent Tommy out to the chicken house to get some eggs. Tommy loves those chickens -- some of them even have names! He spends hours talking to them...I had asked him to just quickly "grab" me a few eggs instead of staying out there for hours. In about five minutes, he came in and said that the hens were all laying...

Half an hour later, I had been out to the chicken house at least 4 times to check for eggs, and those pesky little things were still sitting in their little "laying boxes." You would think they would lay more than one egg a day considering the hours they spend sitting there!! I was beyond feed-up. Marching back there one more time I once again - I feel really silly for saying this - but yes I once again yelled at those chickens. :) If you would have been one of those flies on the wall you would have heard me more up-set than I have probably ever been with a person...

Finally I stormed out of there and ran down to our garage. We have a 3 car garage full of boxes since we haven't moved all our stuff back into our house, so I had to dig awhile before finding our baseball bats...Yes, baseball bats. :) By now, Livy had joined me, so we both grabbed one and made our way back to our "dear" chickens.

You can probably imagine us by now. I'm sure we were a sight to behold!

Glancing at Livy, I was so glad to see that she was as scared as I was! I have never been a "chicken person." They are there to give us eggs, and when they aren't then they just scare me with there beady little eyes and ugly "peckers." I said something like, "We can do this. They're just chickens. We are way bigger than them, so there is nothing to be afraid of." I know it sounds really dumb, scared of chickens, but I am. :)

So, we arrived back into the chicken house and just stood there looking at them. They were still sitting there. You would have thought that just one of them would be done by now. But it was more like a Wal-mart women's restroom -- they just sorta lined up and as soon as one was done, the next one hopped in before you could get over there! They would get so mad when someone got too close as well.

But we weren't going to be scared of our chicken any longer. It was time to show them who was boss. :D

So...we had baseball bats. What on earth did we have them for? Finally Livy got up the guts to do something. We decided that we would try one at a time to get them out by pretending to hit them with the bat, stopping just before actually hitting them. We DID want these chickens to lay eggs again, and knew it wouldn't be good news if we actually killed one. So the point was to just scare them.

Carrying out the battle plan, Livy moved forward. And she succeeded in scaring the chicken out of its box. As she stuck the baseball bat into its face, it completely freaked out and came flying toward MY head. Haha, and yes I screamed. Very loud. :) Livy also screamed. Very loud. And the chickens all started up their little clucking noises...Very loud little clucking noises.

Livy and I ran out of the chicken house and back to our house. Rosy was sitting on the porch, and we begged her to come help us since she is the animal lover in the family. Praise the Lord, she came! Only after a stop to get another baseball bat though. :D

When we got back out to that little house, the chickens were still clucking and the rooster had come in there to see what the problem was....The only thing I am more scared of than hens is roosters. I was so much more than feed up at this point.

Why was I doing this again? Oh, yeah I needed eggs for my breakfast rolls. The dough inside was probably already rising and I didn't even have all the ingredients in it yet!

After about 20 minutes (haha, or so...) the chickens calmed down enough for us to enter their humble abode. We eagerly checked the box we had scared the hen out of -- hopefully it would have my 3 eggs in it so we could just be done with this. It was empty. :)

Battle plan number 2 -- two of us held baseball bats in the faces of the chickens. If you hold it just soo far away from their faces, they don't move at all, but if you pull it just an inch closer or futher, it upsets them greatly. (We learned quite alot that day.) As 2 of us did that, the other one reached under them to pull out an egg.

There was great rejoicing when the first one was pulled out, (although Rosy had a bump to show for it :D) but when the hen realized what we did, she was very mad and began the clucking again. I think that their clucking must mean something like, "these people mean danger" or something, because it got all the chickens up-set and then the roaster returned. So, we left for alittle while. :)

When I checked on my bread dough, it was indeed rising. :0(

After about another half hour of screaming, clucking and such, I had my eggs. I was thrilled and quickly finished my dough, rolled it out, and cut it into rolls. Sighing a "finally" I popped them into the oven. It was 4:30. I believe I had started at 2:00. :) They took 25 minutes to bake, so I took a break from the kitchen and joined my siblings in the school room. 25 minutes later, the buzzer went off and I pulled the rolls out of the oven. They were twice the size they had been and not at all baked!!!

Confused, I tried to figure out what was wrong. I had preheated the oven. I had set the timer for 25 minutes. Besides the egg "thing", I had had no problems with the dough.

We have a double oven. I had preheated the bottom one, and put the rolls in the top one. :) By now, I felt like throwing those rolls out, but baked them anyway, IN THE RIGHT OVEN!

Besides the fact that they were huge and that I messed up on the frosting -- they were yummy! They seemed a little off-balanced too...Probably a mixture of rising WAY too long and having the egg added at the wrong time. :)

After dinner, we were getting ready to leave for the evening, when Tommy came inside crying very hard. He ran up to me and just fell into my arms. He said, "There's a snake in the chicken house eating the eggs!"

Snakes are another animal I don't care to spend my time around. :) Let's just say, Daddy was the hero and chopped its head off. (I think that it was a black diamond rattlesnake, but we don't know for sure) But it creeps me out to think that I possibly spent hours in a chicken house with a snake....I think that I'll be checking to make sure I have eggs next time before beginning to make rolls. :D So, why did I post this embarrassing and silly story? I don't know... Just because it's life. I hope it brought a smile to your day. :) Thinking back, those hens remind me of myself sometimes -- knowing what they need to give up, and not wanting to. I definitely don't ever tell God, "Here you go! Take away all this stuff in my life...I really don't need it because I have you!"

Everytime I bake those breakfast rolls, or gather eggs in the chicken house, I pray that God will remind me of this day and how I shouldn't hold onto things as much. You never know what the next day is gonna hold. I hope that this "experience" will always remind me it is very important to let God take your "eggs" cause you never know what He is gonna make out of them, and you want whatever He has planned to turn out just like it was meant to! :)

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Sorry that the pictures have nothing to do with the post -- my camera hasn't been working right lately!

Oh and coming soon is a "Tour of the House." Sorry it's taking me forever to get it done...it will be soon though!