return on our investment

I am interrupting my s l o w Costa Rican recap to bring you a chicken update. We have eggs! We actually have for about 3 weeks now, and it is so exciting. One of our most favorite things to do in the evening is go out and collect the eggs-- even though we can pretty much guarantee a few eggs a day (usually around 5 to 7), it is still pretty thrilling every day to go out and actually have a bundle of eggs to bring in. Our kids love it, too, and we cannot walk out the door without Pearl asking "Chicken? Egg?" and lunging out of my arms toward the backyard to go see for herself. George shed some tears on the first day that we got eggs once he realized that these eggs were going to be eaten rather than hatched-- he had been thinking all along that we would be getting eggs that had baby chicks in them to hatch like we did last time. He was pretty disappointed, poor little kid. I felt bad that we hadn't thought to make that clear to him and had broken his heart like that-- he really was so sad about it. He still sometimes says that he wishes our eggs had baby chicks in them, but he's not sad about it anymore, and he loves going out to get the eggs and bringing them in to be washed and put away (both chores that he completes happily).

By the way, we absolutely LOVE having our chickens. They come running to us when we walk in the backyard and they kind of hunch down when we reach out for them so we can pick them up. They are seriously the best pet in the history of earth: they live outside, they are so low maintenance, they let us hold them when we want to, but we don't have to attend to them like other kinds of pets, and hello, they give us food! I'd like to see your dog do that :).

Here are the kids on the morning that we found our first eggs.


And here is a shot of a carton that we filled up just today. We hadn't gotten the eggs yesterday, so when we went out this evening there were 14! We were laughing as John just kept pulling egg after egg out of their little nest. I love the different eggs from the different breeds (the brown/tan ones are from our Plymouth Barred Rocks (Luigi and Blue), Rhode Island Reds (Maude and Spot) , and Sexlinks (Leapy and Colorful), the white ones are from our Leghorns (Strongfluff and Willa), and the blueish green ones are from our Americana (Bevisa)). I'm telling you, go build yourself a coop and get some chickens-- you'll love it!