Listen up, wanna-be chicken owners: RAISING CHICKENS IS HARD.

I am here to testify that running fresh water and feed down to the chicken coop, located a 250 yards from our house, in ankle deep snow is back breaking labor.

This morning, despite 20 degree temperatures, I was sweating my Carharrt overhauls off, trying to carry a feed bucket AND a water bucket AND a shovel down to the coop (and I’m 4 months pregnant).  And then I had to clean the chicken coop, a twice-weekly necessity since the birds can’t frolic and play in the yard like they usually do because of the snow so they hang out in their coop all day, shatting their brains out, and I’m sure my baby is going to get lysteria from me inhaling all those scat fumes, but I can’t have the chickens mucking around in that stinking filth all day. But I couldn’t scoop the scat into our compost bucket because it was already half full of frozen kitchen scraps. So I had to hoof the bucket deep into the woods and up a hill, to try to dump its frozen contents into our big compost bins, which turned out to be a laughable attempt at efficiency because there was no way this frozen block of kitchen scraps would dislodge from the bucket. (What was I thinking?) So I trudged with the bucket all the way back to the coop — now feeling very much like the dying kid in the last scenes of Into the Wild — and tried to scoop chicken poop into the unfilled half of the compost bucket. I then made 5 trips back and forth to the house to dump the poop on various garden beds that needed it. Except those were already covered in 6 inches of snow, so really…..what was the point of this ridiculous exercise? What was I thinking?

And then I realized something:  This type of work is WHAT HUSBANDS ARE FOR.