Peekaboo

I noticed in a couple of the last posts that I may have confused a few of you with those large hens I had pictured. About 6 weeks ago or so I bought 3 full grown hens so that we would have eggs now, rather than wait on these pullets to get up and those were the hens you saw pictured. We do still have the 21 young chickens also, which are getting pretty big, but they were not the large black and white barred ones in the post about pest control.
Anyway, we got those 3 hens from a young lady in a county north of us who raises a lot of chickens. . Since we have been very pleased with the Barred Rocks laying ability, I figured "sure", wouldn't mind having a couple more of those myself. And, since Allen just happened to have just bought an incubator, we figured, why not? So, I gathered 2 eggs from each of the 3 hens and we put them in the incubator. We waited 21 days and sure enough, I heard peeping one day coming from the incubator! Four of the six eggs hatched. We could easily tell which eggs came from which chicken and noticed, oddly enough, that Bertha's eggs were the 2 that didn't hatch. She is the largest and oldest of the hens. I don't know what the deal was there, she is certainly young enough to still be producing. Maybe she told the roos to go fly a kite! Anyway, after a stressful couple of days (for us, not the chicks) we got 4 little babies. We had to help 3 of them out of their shells as they had not been able to completely free themselves even after 24 hours of trying. I wasn't sure how they would do but, as you can see, they are now a handful of very rambunctious chicks. I built a little playpen for them to stay in during the day and at night they go back in the tub in the coop. With my luck we got all roosters in this four but I can't really tell at this point. I do know they are very spoiled though and a lot more friendly than the others due to being handled so much since hatching. If you put your hand down in their pen they will run and jump up in your palm so you can get them out. They are a hoot!

About a week ago I started a list of subjects to write about here and it has helped organize my thoughts quite a bit. I still get in rambling moods though and have been in one lately. I often feel like I'm not posting about much that is interesting and feel that is reflected in the lack of comments at times. I certainly don't have the...uhhh.... adventures... I once did! But I still feel compelled to write because the house isn't finished and that is what I started writing for. I guess that seems odd. Well, that is not entirely true. I have written this blog because I enjoyed the conversation and meeting of other people, albeit not in person. I wish I could come up with some more topics that invited discussion however, because I often feel out of sorts publishing these 'here I'm the great authority on this subject' posts. I would hate to think that my writings suggests that I don't want to hear other people's opinions or thoughts because that is definitely not the case. At any rate, I'm trying to come up with a more organized and informative approach to my posting so that it may be of some help to somebody out there.