RIP Ruby

Alas, this morning Ruby had opened up her wound for the fourth time and we decided that enough was enough. She is no more. She is an ex-chicken.

Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby!

After a week of administering caster oil and massaging her crop, the large solid lump of undigested food was refusing to shift, so yesterday we performed an operation on Ruby to remove the offending mass. Armed with a razor blade, clean towels, iodine and a bottle of superglue, Mab and I carefully cut her open and extracted a small bucketful of fermenting grass (which seriously ponged!), cleaned her up and glued her back together.
All was going well until left to her own devices she pecked open the wound, which was looking quite good until the fourth time of gluing it back together this morning. The ice-cream tub lid collar finally seems to be doing the trick, that's if she doesn't die from superglue poisoning first... At least we had an interesting and novel excuse for James being late for school this morning!

Bonfire night!

We treated James and Jennifer to a late night on Saturday to experience their first real bonfire night. After James's recent run-in with a sparkler, he was quite worried about standing too close to the fireworks but he escaped unscathed, if a little tired and over excited having spent an hour in the company of the undeniably "cool" Uncle Matt, Andrew and Malcolm.