What a Day: Euthanasia, Attempted Explosion and Double Homicide

    Yesterday the sun rose just like the day before, but when it set the world was different. It all began when Fritz asked what the word "euthanasia" in his spelling list meant. I explained that you pronounced the word "Youth in Asia" but it had nothing to do with the children in China. We had a long discussion about Dr. Kevorkian and the evil he promoted. My children seated around the table listened as I shared how he infamously assisted terminally ill patients in ending their lives and how he advocated mercy killings of the disabled to harvest body organs. Having a precious brother and son that is disabled suddenly makes Dr. K's valuation of life personal and stink with moral depravity. Though a heartbreaking and hard topic, it was a privilege to instruct my three home-schooled children on knowing our Creator makes no mistakes and that when God gives life, we don't get to decide when to end it. Oh, if only I had known how the sun would set that day.

      When Jane returned home from school, I was distracted with dinner preparations so when she asked if she could do an experiment with salt, I replied only, "Don't use too much." Fast forward, Ben went to the barn to use the punching bag and decided to let Chuffy, our dog, out of his pen. While Ben was working up a sweat, I was blissfully ignorant that Jane was drying ice in paper towels so that she could combine "Dry Ice" with water to make an explosion and that Chuffy had run away. Well, much later Jane disclosed that she logically decided that ice didn't have to be that dry if you were just going to pour water over it anyway, so she ceased blotting the ice between paper towels, put it in a Walmart bag, took it outside to add water and threw it on the pavement. In her junior chemist's mind, Jane expected a puff of smoke or a loud crackling, but nothing happened. (Shocker!) Though I knew not of her pure disappointment, Jane's spirit was indefatigable.

    Rewind to the moment when Jane asked to use salt, because in her 10-year-old recently-learned storehouse of knowledge, she knew that sodium and water could also cause an explosion. Application was the key to her curiosity. In full disclosure, I wouldn't have believed my sweet Jane was capable of causing an explosion, but if I had seen her face fall after her second failed attempt it would have been almost as dismal as what happened next.

     Chuffy was still missing and I sent Emily and Teddy to go find him. Half an hour later, Emily, out of breath, returned and in a horrified whisper-yelp said, "Chuffy killed two of our neighbors' chickens." She informed us with big eyes that he then had the audacity to jump in our neighbors' pool to wash the blood off of his lips and the feathers off of his back. A sweaty Ben and an aproned I, stirring the sausage for dinner, heard the mournful tale with growing horror. How could we make amends? The timing seemed highly questionable as we had been already asked to take care of the neighbors' chickens in the next few days, during spring break. Taking care of chickens should not include burial.

     The sun's rays were slanting low on the horizon as I turned off the burners on the stove for dinner and Ben and I unenthusiastically climbed into the car to go apologize to the neighbors. As we backed out, we hardly noticed Jane still on the driveway with a knotted plastic bag which she was throwing repeatedly on the cement. If we had taken the time to look closely at her face, we would have seen her brows knit in concentration as she had not given up trying to cause an explosion.

       Sometime in all this excitement, Alex and Fritz came home from soccer practice. When we all finally sat down at the dinner table for spaghetti, Ben told Jane, our budding chemist, that he had a professor in college who absent-mindedly put pure sodium in his pant pocket which spontaneously burst into flames due to his body moisture. Fritz added, "He must have been a liar." Chuffy, outside in his pen, knew nothing of the Youth in Asia, the Dry Ice incident or that he had been mistaken as a coyote by the neighbor. All Chuffy knew was that he had had the best day of his life. From the safety of our kitchen we watched the sun set on a double chicken homicide, but there were likely still feathers floating on the surface of our neighbors' pool.  It was quite a day. 

P.S.
Please comment on what we should give our neighbors as a peace offering.  

P.P.S.
They don't want baby chicks.