We had friends over yesterday.  Good friends.  Friends that will bring all of their equipment over and teach you how to properly slaughter your chickens.  Those kind of friends are keepers.

With somewhat sad hearts, we ended the lives of our meat chickens yesterday and now have them in the freezer.  No, I wasn't able to do the actual killing (but Brian did and I watched).  BUT I did take care of gutting and cleaning about half of them.  I'm just glad I wasn't in my first trimester.  We had 15 chickens but were only able to keep 14 since one of them had hurt it's wing and after slaughtering we saw that it had been infected...no need for pictures there.  I'm glad we were able to give these birds a good life, a humane ending, and we will now appreciate our meat much much more than ever before.  It was a good anatomy lesson for John Paul as well...

Thank you so much to our friends who took their time explaining things and then joined us for a feast of our very first chicken!  Oddly enough, it wasn't too weird.