Jumping Off the Chicken Pen

My niece Marie (11 years old) filmed Sacha jumping off the old chicken pen next to our barn on his BMX. My sister-in-law (Marie's mother) said, "I nearly had a heart attack while watching him. I didn't know if I should say, "NO!" or scream!"

My brother Mark pulled up in his pickup truck a minute before Sacha jumped. His little girl Kate ran up to him, saying, "Daddy! Daddy! Sacha is going to jump off the chicken pen on his bike; he is going to get hurt. Do something!"

My brother Mark, a daredevil in his day, replied to his five-year-old daughter, "We all gonna learn somehow, someday…" Then he grabbed his daughter's hand and watched.

Nearly a month later, Marie showed me the video today.

Later, I asked Sacha, "Were you scared?"

He laughed, "Yes! But with a crowd of supporters, I had to do it."

Family love! Family of daredevils. Family on the edge of a nervous breakdown equals support to Sacha…. somewhere along the line, fear and support got lost in emotional translation.

My Mother offered, "After raising five children, four boys, I thought I was through with this sort of thing."

Sacha jumped his BMX off the chicken pen….. I am so glad he did not do a gap year by the Empire State Building or the Grand Canyon.

The chicken pen has a nice sound to it, doesn't it?



Comments

23 responses to “Jumping Off the Chicken Pen”

  1. Compared to what you’ve filmed him doing in France, that was pretty benign.
    ~elaine~

  2. I second Elaine’s statement! *giggles*
    My parents had a chicken pen that had a curved roof which joined the side walls seamlessly. Wonder what Sasha would have made of them! 😉
    (Have you ever been to Lou Brooks’ “Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies”? You’ll find almost anything there, except a paint brush – oh well, don’t test that one! Here is what looks like a sketch for my grandfather’s chicken coop (he was a master carpenter and I remember his sketches in drawers around the house, which we kids shamelessly used to scribble on the backs): http://www.drawger.com/show.php?show_id=32&image_id=716 -his webseite is http://www.loubrooks.com/ – you may even be even able to see some of his originals in a California gallery, I never have, unfortunately).
    Hugs,
    M.

  3. LOVE!
    That’s it!
    BRAVO Sacha! (but don’t do it again…)

  4. I don’t think that is as bad as him doing flips. Boys!

  5. Boys will be boys comes to mind. . . one of my best friends has a brother who did these things as a child. He is now an explorer. The kind that gets paid to write and film his adventures. She still gasps at what he does.

  6. What about the Eiffel tower? Oy vey! Please Corey, please take pix of your family farm…I am so in love with farm pix and I noticed the “A” in bits of wood on the side of a building (a barn maybe) in one of your recents pix…and do tell a story too…what did you farm? Cows? Pigs? I know there were chickens!
    jackie
    bliss farm antiques

  7. My nerves are glad I didn’t have a boy (not my heart, just my nerves). I feel so full of joy just seeing the kids in the background jumping with excitement. It’s the little things, it really is. I would also LOVE to see more of the farm.

  8. God gave me girls for a reason!

  9. Good job Sacha! It reminds me of a girl I know (me in fact) when I was in high school. I made a box airplane, got inside, and slid down the garage roof. My mom never knew, but oh the pleasure, the thrill of it all. So it isn’t always just boys that are dare devils. I would do it again in a heartbeat if I had the agile body of youth.

  10. Brother Mathew

    Come on Sacha make your Uncle proud. Jump off the chicken pen without the landing ramp.

  11. Are there times you wish there were a few more dashing librarians and accountants in your family tree?

  12. Sacha’s video reminds me of watching the winter Olympics a few years ago…one of the members of the US Olympic ‘ski jump’ team showed a video when he was a young boy, jumping off the roof of his house onto a mountain of mattresses.
    Never know where heart felt joy can lead.

  13. I second Choop’s comment.

  14. nice, clean Jump!

  15. It’s a good thing I didn’t have a camera on me the day I heard Sasha come running from behind the barn, carring a ramp that he would toss down next to a fire Dolores had built. As quickly as he appeared, he dissappeared saying something about jumping with his… and all of a sudden coming around the corner is Sacha going 50 MPH on his BMX Bike…. Up, up, up the ramp he flew over the burning fire! My mouth dropped open as I looked over a Corey’s French Husband. I don’t think I said a word. One thing is for certain… when opportunity knocks… Sacha is there!

  16. Somehow it looks as though he had practiced that jump before. He looks rock-steady.

  17. That was awesome. When I was a kid in Central California, we also had a chicken pen, but it was connected to the barn. Whenever a load of manure would be dumped near the chicken pen, we’d all jump off the roof onto the pile. We didn’t care that it was poo! Oh what fun it was though.

  18. WoW.

  19. loved the “yieh” at the end !

  20. Terrifying! How did you stand it? But, I admit, very cool as well 🙂

  21. Go sacha!! I didn’t film this though! Oh well!!

  22. Lovely story about cousins. I grew up in a big Portuguese family on the East Coast. Everything you talk about rings true for my family as well. Friends, cousins, family are all the same thing. Oh, but there’s one more thing. Our family is like a giant sponge. We absorb people into it, sometimes with their blessing, sometimes against their will. It all ends the same, once you belong – you belong forever. You’ve given your son a wonderful gift.

  23. ah! a mother’s heart…

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