Juxtapo-chicken

 Yesterday while this refined, elegant table was being set and readied, and subsequently enjoyed by my Shelter girls, the below scenario was playing out in wild shrieks, boisterous pronouncements and urgent, terrified chirps.  "WEET! WEET! WEET!!!!"  Quite the juxtaposition of events!

What happened was, Coco.  I was going to finish that sentence, but I think just the word Coco explains it all.  I sauntered into her kitchen at 9:10 yesterday morning to retrieve Ptolemy, who had woken up concerned that somebody was going to eat his baby turkeys.  He had to go see them!  Coco said, "Doesn't Tolly have preschool right now?"  Why yes, he did.  I honestly don't know how I keep forgetting preschool.  It's been happening every Tuesday and Thursday since September.  This time, I had a pretty good excuse, which I explained to Miss Sharla upon showing up 15 minutes late:  "Sorry, I forgot because of the baby turkeys.  Also, he doesn't have his backpack, and that's just lipstick all over his legs.  So he doesn't have a rash."

Pretty sure my explanation prompted more questions than it answered, such as, "Baby turkeys?"  and, "Lipstick?"  Yeah.  Remember on the way home from the zoo when I turned around and Tizzy was sitting calmly in her seat looking like Robert Smith, lead singer of The Cure?  For some reason, the kids thought wiping all that lipstick on their legs would be a good way to clean it up, and it stained.  Why did they think legs were good substitutes for wipes?  Same reason Ptolemy said to me the other day, "I went in the laundry room because I had to get a sock to wipe my nose..."

One time!  ONE time, he sneezed in the car and there were no tissues, so I gave him a stray sock to contain the damage.  So now I have a kid that's going to grow up and one day say to a runny-nosed friend, "Oh, your family uses tissues to wipe their noses?  Huh.  We use socks.  We keep them in the laundry room with the chickens.

Ptolemy named the chicks Eight, Eight, Olaf and Sven.  

Not sure why two of them are named Eight.  

We're not allowed to question that.

Ptolemy is in love with his birds.  He croons, "They have sunflower eyes!"  And then he sighs.  Now that I look, they do have little brown eyes that are shaped like sunflower seeds.  Aaaaww!