Chicks Are Home!

Good Evening, Ladies and Gentlemen. My name is NorthernDaddy, and I will be your guest blogger today. Normally, I spend my time over at http://northernbaby.blogspot.com/, and only rarely make a behind-the-scenes appearance here as a proof reader and editor (you've noticed some grammatical errors here before? I leave them there on purpose - if I corrected them all, there would be no time left for eating ice cream!). I have been assigned tonight's guest spot because I'm "funnier" when it comes to talking about chickens.

I don't know if you, the reader, know how the chicks came to be in our home. It started two years ago when we 'discovered' a chicken coop attached to the side of our shed (we had a few weeds blocking the view). At that time, we were starting to try and live more consciously with regards to the environment and the 'green' lifestyle (meaning that we would stop pouring our used motor oil on the grass out back!)(Just kidding - probably not real funny with the current BP/Oops, we spilled some oil situation....) As we learned more about 'green' living and the modern homesteading movement, one member of the family started to think that we should put that old coop to use. (The other voting member of the family disagreed strongly!) Well, the extremely persistent, pain-in-the-@**, I-want-chickens member of the family started to wear the dissenting member down, bit by bit. The final straw can be attributed to the young lady over at http://coldantlerfarm.blogspot.com/. We had been following her blog for a while, and eventually bought her book (Made From Scratch). It turned out to be a good read, and she made keeping chickens sound so easy, that I was finally turned to give in to the Chicken Lady in my own home. (Thanks a lot, Jenna - if we ever meet, you owe me a beer.)

Below is a picture of a Buff Orpington chick. After some setbacks and an interesting ride home from the farm store, there are currently seven of these fuzzballs raising a ruckus in my kitchen. Seven chicks inside a large box (copy paper size) have a lot of room to slide around when the car makes a turn or stop. When they weren't bouncing off the sides of the box, they were chirping loudly (about my lack of driving skills, I guess!). Little man was riding next to them in his rocket seat, and I kept trying to have a conversation about the chicks with him:

Me: "What are those things in the box?"

Little Man: "Chishins!"

Me: "What are we going to do with the chishins? Sorry, let me say it right - chickens?"

Little Man: " EAT THEM!!"

Me: "Noooo, we're going to take good care of them and get some eggs from them, right?"

Little Man: " WE EAT THEM!"

And so on - the whole way home.

Little Man has an extreme interest in the chicks living in our kitchen. He would like to pick them up and just looove the stuffing out of them. We have embarked on an intensive program to teach him to handle the birds gently, not squeeze them flat. He's a slow learner in this area. The chicks are very fast learners in this area - they run and hide out of his reach when his footsteps come clomping across the floor!

Cute, right?

Little Man had the idea to give truck rides to the chicks. Tell me, when's the last time you saw a baby chicken riding around in the back of a dump truck?!!

Stay tuned for periodic updates on our chicks, and what we learn about raising laying/meat birds in a sustainable way.