Chickens in My Pantry! :-) (lil update)

Six of our eight eggs hatched today, and the other two have pipped...Hurray!!

Two bantams of unknown breed, one araucana (or x), and three others(regular size brown eggs, don't know what breed) so far. The other two eggs are regular sized brown eggs as well.

I think the pale yellow one(actually nope, this one isn't a bantam!! lol, it's one of the other golden ones:) and I know a the golden one with feathers on it's legs are the bantams.

This striped on is the araucana...

The yellow one is our feisty one so far. It peeps LOUDLY and kicks when you pick it up. The others are quite calm.

I can't wait until the cousins are all well and can come see them! :-)

UPDATE: :) Yesterday evening number seven hatched and he/she is as loud as the other six put together LOL. Number eight hatched in the middle of the night! I'm so happy they all hatched, we were told to expect about 75% but the boys were praying for them the whole time:) More pics coming soon...

The Biggest Kid, lol...

My Boys

Candling Our Chicken Eggs

You know how some days you can't get a sentence right no matter how many times you write and erase it? Today appears to be one of those days. And I'm just writing about chicken eggs for crying out loud... So, what to do? Start writing about how you apparently can't write today. That should get the juices flowing. One hopes.

So, last night we candled our chickie eggs. Before I tell you how that went I have to tell you about something I'm still chuckling over. Saturday as we were driving about contemplating ways of amusing ourselves hubby and I were discussing the possibilities of a little farming venture. Along with our gardens and orchards that we have begun we were talking about chickens and goats for eggs, milk, and meat. Suddenly from the back seat Joshua speaks up. "By the way, all the chickies that hatch from our eggs in the our incubator are not food."

I assured him that all the chickies that hatch from this batch will just be pets. He insisted "every single one!" "Yes", I told him, "every single chickie that hatches from our eggs that we have now will just be a pet. Not for food."

We had a bit of trouble seeing into our eggs. We finally decided that even with all the lights off our kitchen just wasn't dark enough. Anyway, we had four eggs with definite squirmy little chickie embryos visible. Two eggs the shell seemed too thick to see through (?), two were indefinite---hard to see if there was an embryo in there or not. And one egg had a dark blood ring kinda like this...
Which means the chick had died. Overall we were very pleased with our little 'experiment'. Brannon and I really enjoyed seeing the chicks moving around inside their shells. I have to admit, i never thought about seeing them move, DUH! :-) They were quite squirmy though, which was fun. Probably trying to get away from the bright flashlight, lol. Joshua said he couldn't see anything. I imagine he didn't stand still long enough. ;-)

Happy St. Patrick's Day

A New Endeavor

My dear husband has been grumbling rather loudly that we are NOT ready for chickens...
In his defense, he is absolutely right.

In my defense: I didn't procure either eggs or incubator. I merely plugged them in when they were brought through my front door and handed to me. Furthermore it has been several months at least since I mentioned casually to my dear mother-in-law that it would be fun to hatch some eggs to go along with a creation science study. Some day...

So, some day appears to have arrived. The critters are excited. They can't wait until we can candle the eggs to see if there appears to be anybody inside. Joshua, being five, doesn't quite have the concept of time down and whenever I tell him it will be three weeks until they hatch he wants to know if that is today. :-) We put them in on Saturday, March 14. So this weekend we'll do our first candling. In the meantime it's turn them five times a day and keep an eye on the water level and the thermometer. Grandma says it's like babysitting...

The plan is when they are big enough to go outside we'll put them inside the fence around the new trees. Hopefully when the spring and early summer gardening chores (like fencing, planting, greenhouse etc) are taken care of my honey will have time to construct winter shelter for our chickens (assuming they hatch that is). If not, I guess they'll have to winter in the greenhouse...assuming that gets built...

So, you can see his point when he says we are not ready...

Again I say to you, IT'S NOT MY FAULT!!! ;-D

About Me and Blog Awards

Ok, I just want to shout out a big Thank You!!! to the lovely ladies who have given me blog awards in the recent past. You know who you are:) I can't tell you what a thrill it is to see my name listed and know you guys are reading and enjoying my blog. I love it!!! :-)

BUT......... As you may have noticed I'm not so good at following the rules and passing the things on! It's not that I don't appreciate the love. Honestly. I'm just really bad about doing any kind of chain thingy... I never forward emails or text messages, because I don't want to. I'm just not into it. This habit seems to have spilled over into blog land:) So while I'm lovin the love, you must award me at your own risk, as I may or may not ever post the thing and pass it on.

Thanks for understanding (I'm assuming here of course:-D)