Possibly our first hatch...

A few weeks ago one of our hens went "broody", meaning she rarely left the nest box and just wanted to be left alone, sitting on eggs.  Well, for a while I moved her each day, collected the eggs and then left her (she is in the most popular nest box, so almost all of the girls lay their eggs there, even when she's in it).  Once she had shown me that she was in this for the long haul, I decided to give in to her broodiness and let her try to hatch some eggs.  I marked 6 eggs and left them with her.  Each day, when I go collect eggs, I take all but the 6 marked eggs- those are hers.  This weekend, when it had been 7 days since I left her the eggs, I went out and "candled" the eggs.  This means I looked at them (at night, so it was dark out) with a flashlight shining through the egg, to see if I could tell what was going on inside.  Well, I only candled 2 eggs- but I saw signs of baby chicks developing in both!  S was with me, so I know I'm not crazy, we even saw movement in the eggs!  So, now I'm excited that we may actually get a couple chicks from this hatch!  I'm still trying to keep my hopes pretty low, and I keep reminding B & O that the hatch may not happen- but if it does, we'll all be so happy.  I'm a little concerned because yesterday when I collected eggs, the broody hen was in the wrong nest box...hmmm...but I put her back and she settled right down on her eggs and has been there since.  Hopefully she wasn't off them too long and that won't happen again.  If they don't hatch, we'll just try again with the next broody hen, and if that doesn't work (after a few tries) we may get an incubator one of these days- but I'm crossing my fingers, because I'd love to do it the natural way and make one of my hens a mama.  I'm thinking the hatch should be around Feb. 25th, so we'll be watching!