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!

chickens, part four: the coop

One of the things I have come to know about my husband is that he can pretty much figure out how to do anything he wants to. So when he said he was going to start building the chicken coop one Saturday and then proceeded to design and draw a plan, figure out and purchase materials, and get to work I was not surprised. Pretty sure he didn't even do internet research for this one-- just came right out of his brain. [Edit: John read this and informed me that I was too generous with my praise here because he had gone over to a neighbor's house and looked at their coop to give him some ideas for ours. So I guess the idea wasn't completely out of his brain, but the rest was :).] My life would be so much less exciting without him around :). Here are some photos of our coop building journey.

Try not to be alarmed that our children are playing so closely to the deadly power tools. We obviously aren't :).


This is the position that George would assume every time John used the saw. He didn't like how loud it was. Pearl, as you can see, was not fazed in the least.


This is where we put Pearl when we need her out of the way for a little while. She likes it.


Until her brother decides to join her.


She is a little walker these days. She can walk across rooms and down halls, but she still probably crawls about 70% of the time. It's faster.


I love Pearl's little outstretched arms to her daddy. She reaches for him constantly and one of my most favorite things about him is that he always wants her back. He adores his baby girl.


This was from a different day out working on the coop. These pictures are supposed to be switched-- the sequence was her coming up and grabbing onto him, him looking over at her,


then her leaning in to plant a kiss on his lips, followed by her turning around to go about her business.


"Her business," meaning: surveying the scene from her tractor, and getting busy with the tape measure.


And smiling slyly.


She was also pretty helpful with the chicken wire :). And there is a peek of the coop up to that point. The chickens looove it.




This is the best photo I have of it while it was still under construction, but I need to get a new one. It is all done now, complete with a galvanized metal roof and dark brown stain (which we thought was a disaster at first but has grown on us).


And to finish our chicken posts off, here are the last two photos that show our immersion in all things chicken. In my class at school we had the students make these little chicks out of yellow paper plates and their handprints and George really wanted to make one. We didn't have yellow plates, but painting was more fun for him anyway.


Pretty happy about the sneeze I caught in this last picture :).


Now I can blog about regular life again! I have much to do.

chickens, part three: meet the flock

John, George and I had fun naming our chicks. Some of the names have meaning (like StrongFluff, because she was the firstborn of our hatchlings, strong and very fluffy :)), and others are pretty random (like Luigi, because George insisted). Here they are (the photo on the left is from when they were still pretty little and fuzzy, the one on the right was a week later when their feathers were starting to come in more fully):










(Is Bevisa not the most awesome name for a chicken? Makes me laugh every time.)

Here are a few more photos of them together in the backyard. I didn't ever think I would find chickens beautiful, but I must admit, these little babies had their moments.


I like this one of all the eyes.


Pearl likes them now. Maybe too much.


I love this of both my children and their first pets :).


George is a really great brother. He is also a great chicken protector :).


See Pearls sneaky little fingers in there on Maude's back?


Here's a more recent photo of them with more feathers. I need to get a current one because they are now totally feathered (is that a word?).


And there's that touchy Miss Pearl again.


Pictures of the chickens' new house next, and that should about complete my chicken series. Don't be too excited :).

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.


Here is Pearl checking them out after she had decided they were friends and not enemies.