The Day My Toddler Tried To Steal A Baby Emu At The Local Texas Farm

I was knee-deep in East Texas mud, holding my oldest son by the straps of his denim overalls so he wouldn’t launch himself into a wire fence, while a six-foot-tall dinosaur of a bird stared a hole straight through my soul. The farm owner, a guy named Earl who looked like he hadn't slept since 1998, was casually standing on the other side of the gate holding a baby emu in one hand like it was a potato. My son was shrieking at a decibel I usually only hear when the iPad dies, demanding I let him take the striped little fluffball home to live in his bedroom.

If you've a strong-willed toddler, you already know the exact flavor of public panic I was experiencing. You also know that logic doesn't work on a three-year-old who has just decided his life purpose is to own exotic poultry.

That time the feed store guy gave us terrible advice

This whole situation started because my husband thought it would be a cute Saturday morning activity to look at the baby chicks down at the local feed store. We went in for dog food and came out with a flyer for a local homestead selling ratites. I didn't even know what a ratite was, but apparently, it’s a category of giant flightless birds that run faster than my minivan on a dirt road. My oldest saw a picture of a baby emu on the bulletin board and that was it. We were going to the farm.

Earl was more than happy to tell me all about how these birds are raised, and I've got to admit, it made me look at my husband with a whole new level of resentment. In the emu world, the dad does literally everything. I'm talking sitting on a nest of giant turquoise eggs for up to sixty days straight. From what I understood of Earl's mumbling, the male doesn't eat, drink, or leave the nest that entire time, and he loses like half his body weight just incubating his kids. Meanwhile, my husband complains that his back hurts if he has to rock the baby for more than fifteen minutes after a 2 AM feed. Bless his heart, but if a giant bird can starve for two months to be a good dad, I think human men can handle loading the dishwasher without asking for an award.

My pediatrician practically yelled at me over poultry

While Earl was trying to hand this squirming, striped baby emu over the fence to my desperately grabbing toddler, my phone buzzed. It was a callback from Dr. Miller's office about my youngest daughter's weird rash, and when I mentioned offhandedly where I was standing, the nurse's tone completely shifted.

Our pediatrician's office has a very strict stance on kids under five and live birds. I guess I vaguely knew that chickens carried germs, but Dr. Miller told me later that infant immune systems just aren't built for the stuff that lives on poultry feathers and feet. She threw around some terrifying statistics about Salmonella and another bacteria that I think was called Campylobacter, which sounds like a terrible summer camp for middle schoolers but is actually an aggressive stomach bug that will land a baby in the hospital on an IV drip. She made it sound like touching a baby bird was essentially the same as licking the floor of a public restroom. I yanked my son back from the fence so fast I almost pulled a muscle in my shoulder.

My oldest is basically my walking cautionary tale for everything. When he was a baby, I let him crawl around a petting zoo and we ended up paying off a massive hospital bill for dehydration a week later because he caught some mystery farm virus. I'm just gonna be real with you—I'm not doing that again. Hand sanitizer doesn't cure everything, no matter what my grandma says.

Farm floors and why nature is kind of brutal

Since we couldn't touch the birds, Earl decided we needed a full lecture on farm infrastructure. Apparently, if you put a newly hatched baby emu on a slick surface like a laminate floor or newspaper, their little hips just pop right out of the sockets permanently. It’s called splayed legs, and it’s irreversible. They have to grow up on rubber mats or dirt.

Hearing that honestly made me feel a little better about my own parenting anxiety. We spend so much time stressing about whether our houses are perfectly baby-proofed and if the corners of our coffee tables are going to cause permanent brain damage, but nature is out here giving birds hips that dislocate if they walk on the wrong kind of grass. It puts things in perspective when you're folding your fourth load of laundry and wondering if you're ruining your kids by letting them watch too much Bluey.

Speaking of laundry and outfitting these fragile humans we're raising, I basically live out of the Flutter Sleeve Organic Cotton Bodysuit for my youngest. It stretches enough to get over her giant head without a fight, which is a big win in my book. I'll say though, definitely buy the darker colors because the white one will look like a crime scene the very second your baby even glances at a bowl of pureed carrots.

The weird skincare trend nobody asked for

This brings me to the absolute most unhinged part of the emu conversation. When I told the moms in my local Facebook group about our farm misadventure, three different women immediately asked me if I bought any bird fat while I was there. I thought they were joking.

Y'all, they weren't joking. There's an entire subculture of crunchy moms who swear by rubbing emu oil all over their babies to cure cradle cap, eczema, and diaper rash. I sat there staring at my phone in the pickup line at preschool just trying to process the fact that people are taking rendered down fat from a dinosaur-bird and slathering it on an infant's face.

Look, I'm all for natural remedies. My grandma used to put breastmilk on literally everything, from pink eye to mosquito bites, and while I rolled my eyes at her back then, I definitely do it now. But I draw the line at bird grease. The women online kept telling me it matches human skin lipids perfectly, and maybe it does, but my pediatrician told me standard petroleum jelly or a good plant-based cream works just as fine and doesn't require sending an animal to the butcher. I just can't get past the smell or the concept. Give me oat butter or squalane any day of the week. I want my baby to smell like lavender and clean cotton, not a feed store.

If you're trying to keep things natural without resorting to agricultural byproducts, just stick to Kianao's organic cotton baby clothes and plant-based gear. It saves you from answering some really weird questions at daycare drop-off.

Toys that actually survive my house

Earl mentioned that to get a baby emu to eat, you've to drop shiny things like tin foil or silverware into their food bowl so they peck at it. I laughed out loud because that's exactly how I feel trying to get my one-year-old to eat anything that isn't a stale goldfish cracker she found under the couch.

Babies are basically just tiny birds attracted to shiny, dangerous objects. When my middle kid was teething, I spent a fortune on fancy, aesthetically pleasing toys that she completely ignored. I'll be real with you, I bought the Panda Teether Silicone Baby Bamboo Chew Toy hoping it would be a magic wand for her swollen gums. It’s... fine. My youngest likes chewing on the little bamboo ears, but my middle child completely ignored it in favor of gnawing on my dirty car keys, so your mileage may vary. At least it's dishwasher safe, which is the only thing keeping it in my diaper bag.

What actually gets used in my house every single day is the Gentle Baby Building Block Set. They're the real winners purely because when I step on them barefoot at 2 AM on my way to make a bottle, they squish instead of sending me to the emergency room with a punctured heel. The kids throw them at each other, chew on them, drop them in the bathtub, and they somehow still look brand new. It's the little victories, y'all.

Coming to terms with my boring backyard

If you think putting a six-foot dinosaur in a suburban backyard next to a trampoline is a good idea, bless your heart.

We drove away from Earl's farm without a bird in the backseat, much to the absolute devastation of my three-year-old who cried the entire twenty-minute drive home. He told me I was ruining his life and that he was going to run away to live in the barn. I handed him a juice box and turned up the radio.

Raising human babies is wild enough without adding aggressive livestock to the mix. Between the explosive diapers, the sleep regressions that make you hallucinate, and the constant fear that you're somehow messing up their emotional development because you yelled about spilled milk, we've enough on our plates. I don't need to worry about my floor being too slippery for a baby emu's hip joints, and I definitely don't want to explain to my home insurance agent why a giant bird kicked a hole through my patio door.

Instead of chasing wild farm dreams and buying weird animal fats, just grab some solid organic clothing and toys that won't bankrupt you, and call it a day. Check out our collection of safe, naturally-derived essentials below and save the farm animals for a picture book.

Messy questions I usually get asked about this

Are you honestly allowed to keep an emu as a pet?
Apparently, in Texas, you can keep almost anything if your fence is high enough, which is terrifying. But just because you can legally own something doesn't mean you should put it next to your kid's swing set. Adults get huge and can kick hard enough to break a fence post. I'm sticking to golden retrievers.

Why did the farmer say you can't help the birds hatch?
This freaked me out, but Earl said the chicks develop these weird temporary muscles in their necks just to bash through the shell. If a human cracks the egg for them to "help," the chick doesn't struggle enough, and they really end up not absorbing their yolk sac properly. Mother Nature is seriously unforgiving.

Is emu oil seriously necessary for baby eczema?
I'm not a doctor, but my pediatrician rolled her eyes so hard I thought she might pass out when I asked this. She basically said there's zero medical reason to use rendered animal fat when standard plant-based squalane or even cheap petroleum jelly creates the exact same moisture barrier without the weird agricultural baggage.

What happens if my kid touches a baby bird at a farm?
According to my doctor, kids under five are highly susceptible to Salmonella from live poultry. If your toddler manages to touch one before you can tackle them to the ground, go immediately to a sink and scrub their hands with actual soap and water. Hand sanitizer alone isn't always enough for that farm grime.

How fast do these things grow anyway?
Earl told us they go from the size of a cantaloupe to five or six feet tall in their first year. If my kids grew that fast, I'd literally be bankrupt just trying to buy shoes for them. Thankfully, my babies stay in their 12-month onesies for at least a season.