I don’t cry very easily, but  this morning I had to go to my room and bawl for just a few minutes.

My turkey drowned in the neighbor’s watering tank.  I know I will look back on this and laugh, eventually, but right now I’m just so sad.

I’ve been dealing with teenagers all week that stare at me like a deer caught in the headlights when I ask them to hand in their fundraising packets.  One of them expressed how “GAY” he thought the party is that I’ve worked on for, oh, let’s see, six months.  I’m happy to report that after a few words that same boy was apologizing to me and giving me a hug…lucky he’s still alive.

And really, everything in my job has been a lot of fun and I’m excited to see so much generosity playing out for this school, but I’m in the final stretch and the stress might be bubbling to the surface just a tiny bit which I knew would happen and I’m not at all surprised that my emotions are overly charged.

Yesterday, I dropped my kids off at home with instructions to carry all laundry down, sort it and get it started.  You know where this is going, don’t you?  I headed back to town to run more errands for my job.  I called to check on the kids’ progress, “Yeah, yeah we’re doing it Mom…blah, blah, blah.”

No laundry was done.  But, my two little boys did manage to put all the clean laundry laying on their dresser into their dirty clothes hamper, so nice of them.

I didn’t know the task hadn’t been done until I walked upstairs to go to bed and saw all the hampers full to the brim.  If words could explain my anger this blog would be toxic.

I got up at 5:30 this morning, and we all know that I am NOT a morning person, right?  Guess what I was doing?  Yep, carting and sorting the laundry and smelling every article of clothing in my little boys’ hamper to determine if it was clean or dirty and you don’t want to know how many pairs of dirty underwear I stuck my nose in before I decided to just wash all of it.

So, I’m already mad as Hell at my kids and I’m working out in head various methods of torture that I will perform on them when Virginia, my sweet neighbor, calls Clay over to come look in her watering tank.

I was flipping French Toast when Clay came through the door to tell me about our turkey and that was the end of me.  I couldn’t hold back the tears.

We’ve had a lot of animals perish since we’ve started this little farming habit of ours.  It’s never fun to find a dead animal.  It used to shock me, but after burying cats and chickens and another turkey I’ve grown a bit used to animals meeting their demise on the farm.

This turkey was going to be our Thanksgiving bird, maybe.  I loved listening to her chirping and she was so gentle and docile that both Clay and I weren’t sure if we had the heart to butcher her.

Yesterday, I was in a hurry to get to school so I fed the animals and let all my chickens out to graze.  We have one natural source they can go to for water and a water trough in their pen. I figured I’d let them go to the water source and I didn’t fill their trough.  So, in a huge way, I feel responsible for her jumping into the water tank.  If I’d filled the trough would she have done that?  Probably.  Turkeys aren’t very smart and they are terribly clumsy.  We’ve saved them from getting caught in silly situations several times and they were so lucky we found them.  Oh, the guilt of a farmer when a good animal’s death could have been prevented.  I feel horrible.  Even more horrible than I probably would if I didn’t have the stress of poop-stain children weighing on me.

So, there you have it.  My kids are turkeys, the teens at school are turkeys and my turkey is dead RIP sweet Gobble Girl.