The chicken or the egg?

We started on our chicken adventure almost 2 years ago.  I had been pestering my dear husband for over a year to build me a coop so I could join the thousands of happy chicken loving families I had read about online.  Finally one day he said he found me a coop.  That's all I needed to hear and I was online ordering over $100 in chickens...maybe I got a little ahead of myself, as he had mentioned the coop he found wouldn't be available to us for 3 more months.  

With our babies on the way he finally broke down and decided to build me a cute little coop and keep the other building as a shed.  So with that our adventure began.  

We decided that 6 chickens would be a great number to have.  So I did all of my research to find the perfect coop plans.  I showed my DH all those beautiful coops that were dreamy and perfect. He would give me a half way glance from time to time but told me he knew exactly what I was looking for and how he would build it.  Turns out my extravagant visions of 2 story cape cod styled coops were not what he had in mind. As he kept reminding me, "it's just a big bird cage." In the end we ended up with the perfect little coop that I adoringly call my potting shed in the woods when trying to describe it to friends who have not yet seen it.

 Daddy's little "helpers" were with him every step of the way.

 Those cedar shake shingles were a battle I won, but I heard about that for a long time. Every other board would split into little pieces and he would have to get another one! I was entertained, he was not.

 The littles' sure liked their new house! Of course they were about 8 weeks old by this time.

 Ahhh, finished now just for some paint.

 Our boxer was pretty sure lunch was inside the pretty new house, but she soon realized that these little feathered creatures were part of the family and would hang out with them.

All done! Of course I had to paint it myself because DH was DONE with my little project, yes the one he didn't really want to do to begin with.  

And so it began, my somewhat scary obsession with those things that have feathers and give us breakfast every day. I LOVE my chickens.  And everyone I meet hears all about them, to the point that my DH has to remind me that most people probably don't care to learn every detail of chicken husbandry.  But he admits now that they are fun and entertaining.  The kiddos love them, want to chase them, and hug them, and carry them around when they can catch them.

In the end, we had 8 chickens because when we were splitting up our order (we had a minimum of 15) with a friend I couldn't decide which to keep. So I kept all the pretty ones and the head sister chicken that was always perched watching over the others. Of course I paid extra for hens and had our chickens sexed because I didn't know if I wanted to take on a rooster.  Head sister chicken was a rooster. We named all of them. Rosie, Lacey, Ursa, Sophie, Brewster, Pip, Cross Beak and Good Mommy.

We would let our ladies out everyday to free range and they would put themselves to bed at night then I would shut the door.  It worked like a charm until one day we saw all of the chickens (Brewster my rooster included) on the front porch.  It was odd so I went to investigate and discovered one (Pip) missing and a coyote lurking in the woods.  All we found was feathers. So then DH got the wonderful job of building a run to protect our girls.  That was the project where he discovered that our yard grows rocks. Every hole that was dug to put a post took him at least an afternoon breaking the rocks by hand with his breaker bar. 

Now we have 11 chickens, I had ordered the Silkie breed because they are so darn cute.  Turns out they like to have babies and regularly sit on their eggs and hatch them.  All in all the 2 silkies have hatched us 9 babies.  There was some drama with the first brood (the batch of chickens they were sitting on).  I tried to be a good mommy and give them food and water in their nests when the babies started hatching.  It worked the first day, then all hell broke loose and one Silkie (known as good Mommy, who turned out to be a bad Mommy) jumped in the other Silkie's (cross beak, she has a deformity) nest.  Then commandeered the 4 chickens in that nest and left her 1 hatched and 3 hatching eggs behind.  We lost the chicks that were mid hatch.  So we ended up with 5 babies.  Then we started losing our original birds at a fast pace.  One to a coyote, one to sickness, one to heat stroke and finally our rooster had to go.  He was attacking us at every chance and after about 8 months of watching over our shoulder we decided he needed to go.  It wasn't worth him hurting one of the kids. But we ended up with one more rooster from those babies that hatched.  Since then we have had 4 more babies hatch successfully.  Our most recent babies are now 2 weeks old.  Great time to decide to hatch chicks cross beak, we are now in a deep freeze, but they seem to be fairing well.

So that is the long, and short of our chicken adventure.  We have Easter Eggers who lay green and blue eggs, Barred Rock that lay brown eggs, and Silkies that lay cream eggs.  We are usually giving away dozens of eggs, about the time we end up with 10 dozen we start handing them out.  We usually get 1 egg/day per chicken so you can imagine how that adds up, and once the new babies start laying (assuming they are ladies that is) it will get really crazy!