December 11th

I noticed this morning that Aleks literally woke up, opened his eyes, got out of bed and brought back the envelope. Which meant that I was a little more awake than usual.
This was my favorite envelope picture. You may recognize it as one of several thousand Magic Cabin catalogs that came this year. The catalog issue, for what it's worth, is interesting to me. Apparently during recession, it is necessary to remind us all five thousand times of all the things we can't afford. I wonder if it actually yields slightly higher sales or not. I'm guessing the benefit is quite debatable.
I had no clue what was in store for today. I thought it had to be something fairly simple as Thursdays usually involve me going out in the evening as well as Aleks having speech therapy at 3 o'clock, meaning that our time to do something was relatively short. But indeed, it was something quite simple.
We went on Heifer International's website to order a flock of something. Aleks thought we should buy something for friend's of ours who don't have much money, but they're not too much worse off than we are for one thing, and I also do not like the idea of setting up a dichotomy of giving and receiving with friends that even remotely victimizes people we know directly. Which is not to say I'm okay with victimizing anyone at all or those we don't know, but rather that I feel that charitable giving is important but stigmatizing the recipients could be a terrible side-effect. I'm not articulating this well.

First we watched a video about what the organization does that was in the beginning just about the point of Heifer International, but then started hawking these classroom kits, so we stopped it. I think they got the gist. Then we spent a bunch of time deciding what to get. I gave the boys the choice between a flock of ducks, geese, or chickens, or honeybees. Eventually we settled on chickens after I showed them pictures of themselves with chickens that looked just like the little boy on the website.



Then they said that they wanted chickens too, but I reminded them of the photos we were just looking at and how they already have chickens in Dayton. Aleks wants some here. I told him it was illegal, which it is, though if we had a house of our own, I'd probably break that law anyway. There's a battle for that going on right now, in fact, and there's an article about it on the cover of our local free magazine. Friends of ours in another city are also having the same battle and are appealing their case now. They only have two chickens and no roosters and live in a really small town. It's kinda silly, really.