Venturing into the great wide somewhere

It only took a few minutes for the little girls to begin exploring their new home.

So we named her dinner.

Another week has passed and our little chickies are 3 weeks old.  My husband is so ready to reclaim his garage and get the birds outside, but we’re only halfway there.  He’s been beside himself without the use of his home gym.  We’ve made big strides in the coop department, well in the fencing department anyway.  All we have left to do are build and install the gates, and line the bottom section with chicken wire.  We should have time to get this done over the weekend, as my hubby is off Friday-Monday.

3 week old chicks chowing down

 

 

Most of the Chickens are doing well.  Teeny Weennie is still…well…teeny weenie, just look at her next to the Rhode Island Red and across from our SLW.  I don’t think she’s getting picked on, I often see the other chickens picking pieces of sawdust out of her feathers, but they don’t seem to be pecking HER and she doesn’t seem to mind so no need to intervene just yet, but the size difference is so pronounced, that I am keeping a close eye on things.

Dinner

 

 

The only other development in the chick department is the attitude problem of our Silver Laced Wyandotte.  She is rude.  She flys at the other chickens, and she bit me yesterday.  Not just the poke poke with the beak that some of them do, but she hauled off and open beak bit my thumb.  Let’s just say we picked the perfect name for her: Dinner.  Beanie hopes that Dinner turns out to be a boy, but she also said Dinner should eat a lot so will be nice and fat for when we eat her.  My daughter cracks me up.  I don’t know if I would have been as laissez-faire about eating a chicken out of my garage when I was 4yrs old.

Beanie took a picture of Polly and me.

 

Polly is still my favorite girl, she climbs up onto my hand when I visit them, and is so sweet.

Our little Easter Egger is covered in crazy fluff, but is still the softest chick we have. She enjoyed the sunshine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I took our little Ameraucana outside for a little bit of sunshine, but couldn’t let her down.  I know she hasn’t gotten enough feathers yet to stay warm in our sunny 50 deg weather.  (And our cat was winding around my ankles when I took this picture.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In other news Beanie has been doing well with her homeschooling.  She just finished the systems of the body (it helps that Dad is a Nurse Practitioner) and we’re starting a series on poetry and music.  She has written a few haikus and typed them up on the computer, then we print them out and water-color paint over top of the poem. So far it has been a blast, I’m going to start with other types of poems next week, and we will compile them all into a poetry notebook.  Here is one of them.

Rainbows

they make me smile

orange yellow purple red

shining in the sky

She has also been working on a photo scavenger hunt. Here are a few of the photos that she took.

Something Green

Something shorter than she is.

something alive.

Something that is a circle.

Something red.

The Coop and The Flood

So we’ve been doing a ton of work on the coop this week.  We painted it and finally got locks that work (though some of them still need to be installed.)  My husband helped me mount the door and then he, Beanie, and I sanded it down so it would open and close smoothly.  The baby chicks are all doing well, we still hold each one every day and most of them are very calm once you get them in hand.  I gave them a few pieces of cantaloupe yesterday and they stood about six inches away in a little line staring at it.  Then one would jump over the food and rush back in line to wait for the fruit to launch a counter attack.  This lasted a few minutes and I got bored.  My daughter looked in about half an hour later and said “Hey they really like those melons!” Once they figured out how delicious they were it was pretty adorable.

My fantastic husband is 6'2" so that gives you an idea how tall this coop really is! Good luck you evil raccoons!

The floor is finished on the inside and will never look as good as it does right now!

 

Beanie helps sand the door frame.

So now that the coop is pretty much assembled and painted we’ve pushed our focus to the fence.  We’ve decided to make two separate yards for the chickens and rotate on a 4-6 month basis so we can give the ground a rest.  The kids were out helping with that too…my hubby has the patience of a saint with these little helpers.  🙂

Bubba and Beanie help Daddy tighten the fencing onto the poles.

 

 

Sinking the poles for the coop's fence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beanie wanted a few pretty extra touches added on to the coop (she wasn’t a fan of it being brown) so I free-handed some tulips onto the nest box door.  She approved.

 

 

That’s our coop update.  One last little bit of excitement was our flood yesterday.  Now I just wanted to impart a teeny little piece of knowledge.  I am sure you’ve all heard that it only takes a second for a kid to drown in a bathtub, but what you may not know is that it takes less than a minute for a 2 1/2 yr old to dump half a bathtub’s worth of water onto the ground.  I also learned that it is extremely difficult to get water out of heating ducts, but not difficult for the water to drip from the heating ducts onto the drywall and into our downstairs light fixtures.  It was a…fun…evening.  I did get some great advice from my aunt when I called her and my uncle in a panic: “Maybe don’t let the toddler have a bucket as a bath toy.”  Touche.

ahhhh isn't that a pretty little coop. (Or as Bubba calls it, the Chicken House.)

...in case you didn't know what those oval things were, the ones sitting under the chickens...