Thoughts on Eggs (and other little things)

I have been thinking about
our chickens lately.

I am afraid I have been a bit oblivious of them.  Since I learned that our puny family of a mere seven souls would be joined by a sneaky little stowaway, I have been a deer in headlights.  I have always told Guy that if babies would have come to us easily, and we were younger, I would have rolled out the pink-n-blue welcome mat and bought an insurance policy for my nursing bra collection. It's not the wanting them, it's the loosing them that has left a weakness deep in my bones. After the shock of "the two pink lines" faded, the headaches and cramping came, and I waited for the end. 

In that time, our chickens - "The Girls", as I call them- have been watered and fed, mostly regularly.  I had the kids throw some hay into their coup to edge out the drafts.  Guy tacked up a tarp to cut the winter chill.   Basic maintenance.  They stopped laying when the cold hit, and let's just say I haven't been going out there to cuddle them.  Yeah, not at all.

The other day I finally stopped passing the black farm hat to the kids and went to the coup myself.  I cleaned it up a bit, watered the girls and restocked the food.  Then I noticed some golden brown orbs poking out of the straw.  Ten eggs.  Ten!  While I was on the couch trying to make the the molecules in the air stop crashing together so loudly, those birds were out there in the cold working their little egg-makers off.  I know they aren't even trying, they are just out there, doin' their chicken-thang.  The eggs grow, that is just what they do.

And while I have been in here watching dust bunnies swirl on the floor when ever someone walks through the room, a certain tiny human has been growing retnas and a spleen and, apparently, little thumpy limbs.  In my brain, I was "pregnant", a temporary and frequently fleeting condition around here.  But something occured to me the other day...

Um... hello... there is an actual BABY in there.  The soon-to-be pooping, crying, needing-a-name kind.  And it is getting sorta, I dunno, ... big.  All energy has gone to getting the heck outta that evil "First-trimester jungle".  Once out, I forgot that the baby (not just my bod from the earlobes down) is actually growing.  I picture the baby about 3 inches long ricocheting off the walls of my generous vessel like a ping-pong ball in a dryer. 

You would think after (a-hem)... five... of these little biology experiments I would know what was going on.  But it just now occurs to me...

We are having a baby.  And all my "I'm too old" and "People will judge" and "It probably won't even survive" has not detered the wiggly critter beneath my ribs from organizing it's DNA into a  nano-human.

Holy moly.  We are having a baby.  Well, wha'do ya' know.

Eggs are amazing.