Life Upstream: chickens, part two: fuzzy, fluffy, cute

I mentioned in the first post that in addition to hatching 4 chicks from eggs, we also added 7 more babies to our flock so we could have a good variety of breeds. We gave one of our hatched Leghorns to our neighbors (who are embarking on a chicken raising adventure as well), so we ended up with 10 chicks total. We didn't actually want that many (really, what will we do when they are all laying one egg a day?), but John just kept deciding that we needed "one more" when he was buying them. Luckily we are sharing the eggs with a family in our neighborhood, and John's mom might take two chickens to her house at some point. At any rate, we have a whole bunch of little chickies and this was the scene when we first brought them home.

The kids (Anna was over playing with George) were quite intrigued. At first they just looked.

Soon enough George wanted to hold one. I love his little satisfied grin.

Pearl seemed to like the idea of the chickens...

...But the reality of them? Not so much.

She was seriously hysterical. For the first couple of days she wanted to be next to the chickens' box constantly, mainly just so that she could yell and scream at them. It was like she wanted to enjoy them, but she was almost jealous or mad at them at the same time. We made the mistake of referring to them as "babies" at first and I think she may have started to feel a little threatened with all of the attention they were getting. It was pretty funny. Luckily after a couple of days she got over it and now she is just fine with them. I guess it's a good thing that my desire to have another baby right away is not really working out :).

Chicks are seriously cute. I like looking at these pictures because the chickens are totally in their adolescent ugly body stage right now and have lost all cute appeal.

At first we wanted to keep the brand new chicks (that we had hatched) in a little separate container within the box because they were still so fresh. We didn't know how they'd do around the chicks that were several days older. The brand new chicks let us know, however, that they did NOT want to be separated from all of their friends. They immediately started trying to jump/fly out to be with the rest of the flock. It thought it was sweet and funny that they knew exactly what they wanted and they didn't like being away from all of the others.

Hungry chickies.

Roaming around on the floor while we changed their shavings out one day. The best part about baby chicks is that they really like to stay together so they are easy to take care of. They don't need much space and they don't try to run away. They kind of all just huddle together and hang out.

Look at them all sleeping on top of each other.

Some of our neighbors (the same ones who are raising chickens, too) came over to see ours since we got them a day before they got theirs.

They fall asleep in a heap of funny limpness wherever they are when they get tired. It is entertaining.

A few days after we got them a couple of them started jump-flying up to the top of the box to roost. They didn't want to escape (in fact, if they ever ended up outside the box on the floor they would frantically try to get back in), but they just liked chilling up there.