"Adventures of a Backyard Chicken Farmer"...hmm...a new book title?

Wow...It's been a long time...so here's what we've been doing!
So I last blogged in March, and I just realized that March was when we got our baby chicks!  So perhaps between 3 kids and watching our new "pets" grow I've been a tad distracted from blogging fun. =)

This is a picture of our chicken coop, filled with our 6 hens...only 2 of which are laying right now...we hope the others will start earning their keep in the next couple weeks. They get free range in the yard most afternoons, and they are generally really great with tolerating Josiah's chasing and picking them up. (On second thought...maybe that's why the others aren't laying!!)

Here's what they looked like as new arrivals in the brown box sitting on the desk in the guest room...lots of little "peep" sounds...(LOVE IT)

A month later...they look quite different but still "peeping" =). Notice they've moved from the cardboard box to a custom built plywood box...quite a bit deeper...as they learned to "fly the coop" rather quickly. (It's O.K. to laugh at our complete ignorance of raising chickens...we learned as we went along)

In May, the chicks moved out to the coop (Brent's custom coop...he did a fabulous job!) with a heat lamp at night. In this adolescent phase, their "voices" started to change...fluctuating between "peeps" and "clucks"...that was entertaining to listen to. =)

Here's what the chickens look like this morning...Baraka and Birdie are in the first photo, Rosie is the one laying an egg...and Lovely, Goldie, and Matilda (and Birdie again) are in the bottom photo.

Our family LOVES having pet chickens, and now that we are starting to get our own eggs, it's like the icing on the cake. They are so entertaining (we find ourselves mimicking their various "clucks") , they eat lots of scraps, they are kid-friendly, they let us pick them up and hold them, they follow us around, and now they are productive!   The only down side is the poop...free range chickens mess up your yard...tons of poop, everywhere...no more running barefoot through the grass...Ok, Grace and Elijah still manage to get out the door without shoes on...they don't seem to notice the poop...but the phrase, "CHECK YOUR FEET!" can be heard from anywhere in the neighborhood...coming from our back door. =)