Chillin With The Chickens

So, we bought a second hand dog run off of Craigslist and turned it into a chicken run for our 8 week old chickens this week.

It has been really fun watching the chickens run around in there!

You can see the kids here hanging out watching the chicks:



Speaking of which, it is INSANE how fast chickens grow up! It is hard to believe that in just 8 weeks, this:



Has turned in to this:



Isn't that wild?

Below I have some pics of our kids with some of the original six hens we have that are laying right now.

Here is Monkey1 with Buttercup, her Buff Orpington:



Here is Monkey5 laughing at the chickens:



And here is Monkey3 wearing "Rainbow", who is our green egg laying Auracana. [Hey, at least she's wearing *something*! LOL!]



The funniest thing happened last night - I think I wrote about our two crippled chickens - one of the 8 week olds and one of the 2 week olds is crippled. We weren't quite sure what to do with them - everyone said to put them down, and I was set to do it, but Dh wouldn't let me. So, we got the funniest letter in our mailbox yesterday - it turns out that the lady who lives behind us [who has all the birds in her back yard and who inspired us to go ahead and get the chickens we'd been wanting for years] wrote us a note. She runs a *bird rescue* for handicapped birds, and had noticed that we had a crippled chicken and asked if she could take it off our hands. How funny is that? We called her and said sure she could have it and she could have the little one too if she wanted him - she wanted both. Its not like we *wanted* to put the poor things down, they just seemed pretty miserable. So, she came last night and took our two crippled chickens and seemed so excited to have them. She and her husband were very nice, and it was cool to meet them "in person" after all this time.

So, now we "only" have 32 chickens. Most of those I'm planning to sell when they get big enough to tell who is a rooster and who is a hen. We only want to keep about 12 permanently [and that includes our 6 adult hens we already had before we started egg hatching...]

So, that's the chicken update for this week!