Everyone in the household is at varying degrees of under the weather, including myself. It makes sense I suppose as a natural response to the school year suddenly slamming to a halt. I mean it wasn’t a surprise and yet we certainly weren’t prepared for it, ya know? All three kids are upstairs sleeping right now. So strange. I got up after falling asleep with Wilfred for a bit, and took a rapid test, and made a cup of tea. Then feeling at a total loss for what to do with myself if I am not to be driving them around to their typical afternoon activities, did what I do best when I am either flailing or avoiding and got on my mat. I remember yeeeeeears ago Christina saying something along the lines of a little movement and breath when you are under the weather seems like maybe more use than just laying still. I stick to that mostly. And maybe it is just that sitting still continues to be the most difficult posture of all.
Unless it is sitting and staring at the baby chicks, of course, which I have been doing ohhhh so much this week. I keep reflecting on why I am so very enamored with these little home hatches, more so than our mail order freshies. I mean, I always love them all. This is just a bit different somehow. I keep looking out into the hen yard and wondering if any of those hens know that they are mommies? I mean, do they? It seems both ridiculous and somehow important.
The chicks themselves are so hardy and hale. Like the degree to which they are from this little stamp of land stretches so far past their hatch and their 21 day incubation and into the two years that their mama hens and papa rooster have scratched and foraged across it.
These little chicklets are clarifying for me what it is I will and will not do with chicks in the future: I won’t order and rather do these hatches for fun and then fill in with breed specific pullets as needed. That is somehow a very relaxing clarification for me. And I think I am learning from this distinction in a few other ways as well. I tend toward such all or nothing thinking and then behaviors especially when it comes to homesteading and home-educating and home life in general that these specifications and differentiations, however slight, feel deeply liberating. Like some > none (or all, maybe even especially some > all) really does apply to most things for me.
Anyhow, Wilfred is up now and practice is over and as ever I am uncertain whether I made the most of my time to myself or not. I don’t feel very well after all and maybe I just got my period to boot. So we will eat popsicles on the porch and play with race cars for a bit and I will try to ease my mind and my body toward the next thing without too much worry or overcomplication. At least I will attempt that. It is imperfect which feels like the on-going reckoning of me with myself.