An Introduction

This blog is a little bit about everything. My life as a mother, a wife, and owner of a home with an acre. We like to call it our family farm. My family currently consists of the human members- my husband, S and our two beautiful girls, B and O; then there are the animals- our dogs, Charlie & Lola Belle and our Chickens. Check back often, you never know when we'll add a new member! ; )

Friday, March 16, 2012

Chick update

Our two little chicks are doing great.  It's a good thing my own children don't grow as fast as they do, though- talk about growing like weeds!  They are a few days shy of 3 weeks old and they have changed so much and at least doubled in size.  I raised chicks before, obviously, but I didn't remember it happening this fast.  Maybe that's because I was too busy with all 14 chicks that I didn't get as much time to notice how much they were changing...?  Or maybe I noticed then and just don't remember now.  ; )  Here are the cute little ones at just over 2 weeks old...


Monday, March 5, 2012

We have chicks!

Ok, so I waited too long to post this, sorry!  This past weekend was O's 4th birthday, so things were a little busier than usual around here.  But, we did end up with some chicks from our first broody hen hatch attempt, which is super exciting.  We had 3 live chicks hatch, but one did pass away shortly after hatching. The other 2 are doing fantastic!  Eating, drinking and peeping away.  They are 1 week and 2 days old today, they hatched on February 25th, their exact hatch-due date.  Now, for the bad news.  The mama hen was not so happy about her new chicks' arrival, and she was pecking them like crazy.  One even had a bloody little head, poor thing.  So, I was forced to take them from her and move them into a brooder up in the house.  They'll be fine there with a heat lamp until their feathers come in more, then they can move back to the broody condo section of the coop and, hopefully, be integrated with the flock after a while.  They'll probably stay up at the house a good 6 weeks or so, though.  This wasn't exactly my plan, but things don't always work out as planned.  I had hoped to be able to leave the babies with mama hen, that way she could help integrate them and protect them from the others, but since she was their biggest enemy (crazy chickens!) this won't be the case.  I've read that this happens sometimes with hens- they just don't always make good mamas.  Especially with young hens, which mine definitely is- this was her first time going broody- so it was even more likely she'd reject the chicks.  Well, better luck next time, hopefully!  We'll try again with another hen sooner or later and maybe it will work out the same way, maybe it will be different- this is nature we're dealing with, so you just never know!
Ok, ok, now for the fun part- here are some pictures of our new chickies!  (These were taken the day they hatched- you can see that the dark one had some injuries from the mean mama's pecking.)