A while back I saw an idea on another blog to reassemble a complete chicken skeleton, but I wasn’t sure how I would ever acquire the whole chicken necessary for that project. So I tucked the idea away in my head for another day.

Yesterday when I had 60 live chickens staring me in the eye, I knew I had found the source for my “whole dead chicken”.

As “Eric the Executioner” worked his way through the chickens, I put in my request for one chicken to be carefully killed without breaking any of its bones. For good measure, Eric left two whole chickens for me, just in case I should need a back-up bird.

I so carefully cleaned those two birds, making sure I didn’t crack any of their tiny bones, and brought them home complete with heads and feet.

This evening I decided to go ahead and start boiling one of the birds so we could remove the meat and start salvaging the bones. Just as I had the bird sitting in the empty pot with its feet sticking out, Laura and her friends from her youth group showed up at the front door. They were doing a “bigger and better” scavanger hunt, and they asked if I was willing to give them anything bigger and better than the beautiful little teapot they were holding.

I carried my pot and bird to the door and said, “Would you trade for a chicken?” I lifted the bird up by its feet, with the head dangling and odd white feathers sticking out from odd angles. No doubt every neighbor from blocks around heard the screams as the girls recoiled at the sight of Laura’s very strange mother. When they said they didn’t want to trade my chicken for their teapot, I paused and said, “Well, would you like to stay for dinner then?” More screams. Hmmmm. So I went and put the chicken down and started hunting for something else to trade. Finally I found a large round birdcage that doesn’t really work well for our birds, and we made our trade.

Once they were gone, I went back to trying to figure out how to get the whole bird into the pot. The bird simply wouldn’t bend, and the pot wasn’t big enough. So I covered the bird with water, put the lid on as far as it would go, and the bird simmered away with its feet sticking out of the pot.

A little later the two little girls who were visiting our house came upstairs for supper. They saw the feet sticking out of the pot and asked what it was. I turned to Katie and said, “It’s a chicken. Hey, when your mother cooks her chickens, does she leave their feet sticking out of the pot or does she tuck them in?” Katie stared back at me with and then said, “Her chickens don’t have feet. She buys them at the store and they don’t have feet on them.”

Thanks to me, multiple children in the Bloomington-Normal area will have very strange dreams tonight.