First, before I show you how my evening changed suddenly and crazily a couple days ago, I’ll just say first that we still don’t have a calf. If you want to enter my giveaway by making a guess about the date of birth and gender of the calf, go here. If you’ve already entered and want to change your guess, please do. She is looking a lot closer, though—this is how she looked a couple of hours ago (it’s the 27th of July, here, by the way). I’m planning to check on her before I go to bed and again when I first get up in the morning.

Now, back to Monday evening. I had finally gotten started sorting boy’s shirts! The last time I really worked on sorting children’s clothing was just before Little Miss was born, a year and a half ago. It was needing done! So, I had piles of shirts laying around the living room, as you can see here.

Then, Gayle arrived home from work, at about 4:45, with some chickens that a friend who is moving to Australia gave us. Included were three roosters, and she warned him that if they were put together there would be a cockfight. So, I decided that we should probably butcher them right away, and started water heating for the scalding. My boys asked if we could do a few roosters of our own that were ready, and the next thing I knew we were going to do a few old hens and a turkey, too! At that hour of the night, when I hadn’t even started cooking dinner yet! Yes, that’s the kind of craziness that happens here. Strike while the iron’s hot, though. Everyone worked with a will, and an hour and a half later I had this in the kitchen:

I hurriedly threw together some food for dinner, and got started washing and packaging birds while it cooked. By 8:00, I had this:

Yum! I’m so thankful for children who help so well, and for good, clean, fresh meat. Esther was happy that she could change her birthday menu from steaks to roast turkey.