Turkeys

Have you ever worked with turkeys? No, I don’t mean the lame people you work with. I mean turkeys…the birds that you eat at Thanksgiving. Well if you have not let me tell you that Turkeys are pretty unintelligent animals. You see, there are cool animals like monkeys that can get a beer for you and watch your kids and then... there are turkeys. Turkeys easily get lost, can drown in a puddle (or from rain), and think black garbage bags are predators. I had the wonderful privilege of helping to move turkeys one time. This involves moving turkeys that are bred for eating from one barn to another as they outgrew the size of the first barn. Turkeys that are bred for meat are big, like really big. So big that the thought of walking into a barn full of them makes me want to pee myself. I don’t much care for birds and the idea of being pecked freaks me out; even more than raw poultry blech.

So moving turkeys involves herding like maneuvers with big black trash bags attached to things like PVC pipe to scare the turkeys into moving the direction you want them to move in. Sounds easy right? Yeah…umm no, it is not. First of all, your arms will scream out in pain from waving big giant bags on poles that don’t really resemble anything like a hawk or some other bird of prey. At least I am assuming that is what I imagine they are supposed to be emulating. Would it be cooler if they thought they were running from bears? I would run from a bear; no wait I think you are supposed to roll into a ball right? Shit, I better not camp until I figure that out. Secondly, turkeys are dumb. They will run in every direction you can imagine (including into each other), I swear they are suicidal and will run to water, and the best one they sit down. They just sit down like right in front of you so you trip on them and other turkeys trip on them. They become stubborn as an ass. You can gently kick them with your foot and they will just look at you with a, “kiss my ass” look on their face. Lastly, turkeys smell terribly but that isn’t really the point.

I tell you all of this because it has recently come to my attention that 2 year olds are just-like-turkeys. I know this because C is all into tantrums right now. When she gets told no, gets in trouble, or plain just doesn’t want to do something she flops onto the floor in a heap and will not freaking move. This generally prompts me to ask her if she wants a time out. She of course always responds with “noooo.” So I tell her to get up off the floor. Sometimes this works and sometimes it fails miserably. Yesterday morning I actually pushed her across our laminate floors with my foot towards her brother’s room so I could change her diaper. Toddlers are will run away from you at opportune time and are attracted to dangerous water. See? Todders = turkeys. That sounds like pretty solid math to me. I think I just did a proof right?