The Mother Hen

"Even criminally minded geese need to eat"
This is what my friend Traci said when she heard what we did with our kids yesterday. Being the funny, white trash parents that we are we decided to load the kids up and go feed the geese and other foul fowl down at the Oregon State Penitentiary. There is a creek that runs by the pen and there are just hundreds of ducks, geese, (or "honkers" as Samuel calls them) and pigeons. We checked the local news and made sure there was no breaking news of a convict escape and loaded up our rain gear and bread crumbs!

As many of you know, Hot Jeff is a far better mother than I am. He's really into the kids' safety and is always double checking seat belts and crazy stuff like that. I'm pretty laid back and parent by the "natural consequences" method. You know like, "well if they break a leg while riding their bike down the stair case they will learn to not do that again". So on our way home, after having a very wonderful and uneventful time with our prison geese Hot Jeff says, "If we're going to do this again we're going to be sure Samuel understands the geese could snip at him." Of course I reply, "So?" Hot Jeff looked at me like I was from Mars and says, "Well they could bite off his finger". Seriously? Like what kind of teeth does Jeff think these honkers have? My reply to this was, "Well if someday he's on a date with a girl and they run out of things to talk about he can tell about how he lost his finger in a freak, prison goose feeding incident". I made up a good story which I told Hot Jeff the whole way home.

"At 3 years old my parents took me to the state prison to feed the local geese. While feeding them, one deviant goose came striding up and totally unprovoked, bit my left pinky finger off. The blood gushed as my Dad pulled my screaming body into his arms. My Mom sprung to action and tackled the goose. He was shocked by her strength and began to honk and squeal but she was relentless in her pursuit of my severed finger. After what seemed like hours of wrestling my Mom arose victorious with the limp goose tucked under her arm; she had at last claimed victory by snapping its long downy neck with her bare hands.

"We drove to the emergency room at remarkable speed and I was beginning to black out as my Dad carried me into the hospital. Personnel whisked me back to a suture room and began to discuss my hand as if the finger had not been retrieved. About that time my Mom interrupted and said, 'Oh no, we've got the finger. My husband extricated it from the goose's stomach before we left the scene'.

"Tragically my finger was not the only one the goose had greedily eaten that day and the finger my Mother produced was not mine. The doctors tried to attach it anyway but the previous owner and I weren't a match and my hand rejected the finger, hence, my left hand only has four fingers".