We survived.

 Saturday was the day.  D-day for our 31 meat birds.  I was nervous going in.  A little excited.  A lot uncertain.  It's no surprise that I've never done anything like this before.  I think the surprise was that of the 8 adults and 11 kids present, only one of us ever had as an adult.  And thank goodness she was there to show us what to do!

We had stations set up.  A killing station.  (A sad reality, I know, but a necessary one.)  A scalding/dunking station.  A plucking station.  A scorching station.  A butchering station.  And finally a cleaning/bagging station.  There were a lot of us and we all tried out the different stations.  Well, except the killing station.  Lige and Doug did that.  The 2 teenagers joining us also each took a turn.  The rest of us?  We stuck to the other areas!

We started around 9:30am and were done by 5pm, having stopped for a nice lunch somewhere in there.  The afternoon went a lot quicker, since we knew what we were doing by then. 

 Mrs. Lundeen, Miss Laura(one of the brave teens who wielded a hatchet!)  and Me plucking.  I am certain that plucking was the least favorite job of everyone here.

Yes, a morbid sense of humor emerges as you spend a day with this task.  Either that or cry, I guess!  In this picture is Miss Laura, Me, Amana putting bunny ears on me, Katelynn and Mr. Lundeen.

 Miss Laura doing a final cleaning of the birds before bagging them.

Mrs. Althouse (Doug's mother, who was our wise guide in this whole process!),  Katelyn, Angie and Me butchering the meaties.

I got pretty good at this part.  It reminded me of dissecting frogs back in Junior High Biology.   It was so fascinating.  I couldn't help but marvel at our amazing Creator.

Going in, I was a bit nervous about how the kids would handle all of this.  I wanted them to understand the process and be as much a part of it as they felt comfortable, and I sure didn't want to push any of them if they were scared or freaked out.  We were up front with them from the very beginning.  From even before we brought the chicks home, they knew our plan was to grow them for food.  That up-front honesty really aided in their acceptance of the rest of the process.  It would have been traumatic for them if we had tried to shelter them from our true plan, only to spring it on them at the end.

I was amazed at how they all did.  Harrison and Isaac (as well as some of the other kiddos) grabbed the chickens and brought them to Lige and Doug at the killing station.  They witnessed the "running around like a chicken with its head cut off".  Then they proudly carried the headless bodies over to us in the barn to be dunked and plucked. 

The girls helped in the barn as we plucked and butchered the birds.  A favorite job for the girls was cutting off the feet.  I am not sure how this came about, except that they were allowed to do it.  I was tempted to say no for so many reasons.  Like they were too young.  The knives were too sharp.  The chickens were just alive and now they want to cut the feet off?!  Gross!  But I said yes.  And they became co-laborers in this very laborious process. 

The kids thought the chicken feet were the best things ever.  They each carried one a round all afternoon.  They'd give each other "foot high-fours" and giggle.  I couldn't help but shake my head, and wonder what my sister would think if she saw this!

After the work was done and all was cleaned up, we headed inside for dinner.  Look what I found on the window sill next to our door!  Only on a farm on D-day!

We survived.  And I think we will do it again.  I'm not sure if I want to do 31 again, but I could definitely handle 10 or so.  Unless we got a "Whizbang Chicken Plucker".  You should look it up on YouTube.  Really.  We could have done 100 birds in the time it took us to do 31!  Mrs. Lundeen looked it up and is going to have her very mechanical 14 year old son whip one up.  And then we might be selling farm raised chicken...who knows!