Day Two

Unknown time in the early morning: Awoke to both Hannah and Samantha throwing up. Always the best thing to wake up to; no gradual stretching, no easing out of a dream state. Your eyes are opening as your feet are clearing the mound of dirty laundry in the middle of the floor and your mind is racing as to where the closest "bucket" could be.

After dealing with all that, we discovered that 3 more chicks had died. I left an email with the other family that purchased chicks to find out how many of theirs had died. So far we are still at less than 50% dead, so not so bad.

8:30 AM (yes all that happened BEFORE 8AM!): we are on the road heading to the orthodontist for Hannah's broken wire, but not after we stop at the gas station, the bank and the hairdresser (who was closed).

9 AM: Sam drops Abby, Hannah, and I off at the dentist. The dentist agrees to do Abby at the same time so I can cancel our appointment for next week. I put together the gifts for the judges while they get worked on. Sam meantime is returning all the bottles and cans from my mom and the firehouse. He has Samantha, Rachel and Nathalie as helpers. We finish before he does (the firehouse goes through a LOT of cans).

10:30 AM: I am dropped off at the hair dresser for a quick cut. Sam leaves for the other bank and grocery store to buy the sodas for the Public Speaking event.

11 AM: Sam is back at the hair dresser. He never made it to the bank. As he was leaving the battery gauges all bottomed out so he drove to the auto part store where he ended up having to replace the battery. Thankfully we had just bought the battery 2 months ago so it was still under warranty! I still had another 15 minutes or so to go on my hair, so Sam headed for the bank with all the girls.

11:30 AM: Sam returns to pick me up and we go to the gorcery store for the sodas.

12:30 PM: Lunch

12:45: Sam calls the chick place and they tell us to call back the next day with the total number of losses.
Abby and Nathalie practice their speeches while Hannah takes a nap. I tell Samantha that she needs to just rest for 5 minutes so that Hannah doesn't feel lonely. Depsite her insisting that she isn't tired, Samantha sleeps for nearly 3 hours.

5PM: Out the door to Subway. This is one of those family traditions for the nights when we have 4H. All the girls line up at the counter and one by one order their sandwiches. After getting our sandwiches we go to the community center to eat them.

6PM: We set up for the public speaking event.
7PM: Public speaking. We had 23 kids present either speeches or demonstrations. Eleven of them were from our 4H club! It took 2 and 1/2 hours for all of them to present. They were amazing! The Smith girls did excellent jobs. Rachel chickened out at the last minute, but that's okay, she'll do it next year. We also ended up signing on 4 more Great Goats 4H'ers!!
Our judges were excellent and were a nice diverse group: A pastor, A first selectman, a retired teacher, and beekeeping instructor.
We have also decided that I can't make Public Speaking manditory for our 4H club (like I had threatened to do). We'd still be there right now if all 29 members presented!

11PM: We arrived home, removed another dead chick, and threw the children in bed.

I thought this was supposed to be a vacation!?