Domino effect

Today mama chicken taught her little chicks how to eat and drink from their feeders. When I went in to see her this morning, she came out of the nest box and walked over to the feeder to eat. She began to make some really bizarre noises, she then turned, walked back into the box, turned and came back out again.
She kept up this same routine for the next five minutes with it dawning on me that she was trying to encourage her babies to follow her out of the nest box for the first time and copy her.
By the time I returned to her this afternoon around 5pm all five of the chicks were out of the nest box and pecking at the food and one was even brave enough to drink the water. Bravo mama hen!! It just goes to show that you leave well alone if things are going normally and nature just sorts itself out!

In my life, however, things haven't gone quite so easily today. It began this morning with Master Beehive the elder frantically running around trying to print off his homework as we were due to run out of the door, missing the concept of printing it off the night before AND saving it in case you lose the printed copy entirely. He took it to mean he could save it and then there was no need to worry about losing the printed copy as he just wouldn't print one off until it was too late. You'd think in the day and age of memory sticks and virtual learning platforms, he would  have figured out an easier way to do this...All this from gadget-kid who knows the inner workings of anything with buttons and an app! So, we had to hot foot it to the next bus stop en route to his school knowing darned well the bus would have left his original stop. I am sure *whisper* I may have done a little bit of amber gambling and possibly shooting past the man before the traffic lights, only to slam my brakes on him a mile further up the road, probably caused a little bit of stress in his day too, so I apologise for that.

Talking of knock on effects, it's amazing really quite how much influence over other people's lives a small action somewhere else, miles away in the world, can have. Today, somewhere, thousands of miles away, across two continents in fact, someone didn't attend the interview they were lined up to attend. The reason is no matter, however, this then caused the interviewer to have to rearrange the interview for the following day. This then meant there was no suitable flight home that day, so he had to stay another day, returning to his family a full 24 hours later than planned, creating a whole big mess of problems and childcare issues. It is no big deal of course, but if one thing remains with you today, then make it the thought about how what we do has affect and consequence. How, what we say, may be longer lasting than we think, something insignificant to us, may have longer lasting effects on others and, even change the way they think/act/are.
Watching mama hen, her actions will affect the way her chicks behave, the way she teaches them and the way she clucks and bocks at them will create their behaviours and mannerisms. So in both good ways and negative ways we are all very significant. A true domino effect!