One special heat-loving chick

Well after three weeks of turning our eggs and hopeful anticipation of many fuzzy chicks to play with, we hatched one.  Yes, you read right, 36 eggs and one baby!  So the children and I used the failure as a science project.  We hypothesized that perhaps the thermometer that came with our new incubator was inaccurate.  We gathered five thermometers from around the farm and put them in the incubator and found that the one we used was 5 degrees too cool.  So we believe that we cooked our chicks.  When we thought we had them at 99.5, they were actually at about 105 degrees.  We can’t figure out how we have one live chick that survived this sauna.  He was our biggest egg which led to more theories.  Here is a picture of “Buddy” as my son named him, I think “Miracle” is more fitting.  He shivers quite a bit and seems to like being right under the heat lamp, hmmm.

Buddy the Wonder Chick

We think his Dad is “Officer” and his Mom is “Triple Time Cuteness:”

Dad, our sweetest rooster named "Officer"

Mom, "Triple Time Cuteness," an Araucana who lays olive green eggs

This weekend we will test our hypothesis by putting a batch of fresh eggs in the incubator with a new, tested thermometer.  So back to waiting anxiously for three more weeks!

Read Full Post »

Here goes…the first post

For many years my husband and I have worked towards our dream:  living in the country with animals, educating our children at home, growing some of our food, and working in our own business that somehow makes the world a better place.  It’s not for everyone but it works for us.  In all these aspects of this dream we now live,  I discover life lessons, humor and inspiration, sometimes seeing threads that connect them in startling ways.  I hope to share these reflections in this blog, encouraging others to create the life they dream of.  Depending on the season, we also create and learn a variety of things living here, working with fibers is a passion of mine that I look forward to sharing as well.  I took the photo in the header of our farm this morning.

Our 100 pound dog that we finally trained to not kill the chickens, more on that in another post

Read Full Post »