The Perils of Chicken Parenting

If you're reading this thinking, "Another fricken chicken post?" I apologize. You know how sometimes when people have babies, that becomes one of their top topics of conversation? That's me. With chickens. On this blog. I promise it won't last forever.

Last week, we moved our baby girls into their coop full-time. It was sad that first night not to hear their peeping coming from the pen in the living room. When we went out to lock them in their coop for the night, we had to encourage them to get up on their perch (apparently that's where grown chickens sleep) and I pretty much wanted to grab a blanket and pillow and hunker down in there with them to make sure they were okay until morning.

But by night #2, they were putting themselves to bed when it got dark and had already snuggled up with each other on their perch when we went to close the door to their run. It almost brought a tear to my eye. Such grown-up little girls.

All was well in chickenland until Sunday afternoon when we went out to the run to say hello and found our sweet Samantha puffed up in her coop with one eye closed. Like any good new parent, I immediately panicked. We brought her in the house and set up a quarantine station to watch her. As I furiously scoured the Internet for a diagnosis, I came across one too many stories that ended with "and then we woke up and the entire flock was dead." Seriously. Don't look up chicken stories on the Internet.

Of course I wanted to call the home-visit vet, but Mr. W (the more rational one in this operation) insisted we just try washing out her eye with some saline and seeing that made her perk up. He wrapped her in a kitchen towel (and yes, we called her the chicken burrito) and held her in his lap while I carefully dripped saline drops in her affected eye. There were no signs of any other issues (respiratory problems are common with chickens), so by evening we decided to put her back outside with her sisters.

She was acting completely normal by bedtime and the eye was bright and open. She's been fine ever since.

And we've told her siblings that the next one to kick dirt in someone's eyes loses worm privileges for a week. 

Coop Du Jour

The title of this post immediately makes me think of the scene in Dumb and Dumber when Jim Carrey asks, "What's the soup du jour?" And the waitress answers, "The soup of the day." Mmmm...I'll have that.

Anyway, the coop du jour is almost finished over here, which is really great because the girls are getting bigger and more energetic with every passing hour. It seems like just yesterday we were wiping their butts with q-tips and now they fly out of their pen every time we remove the screen top and keep asking me to buy them latest One Direction album. They grow up so fast...

Mr. W has been working furiously to install all the final pieces of the coop—like the automatic door that will let the ladies into their run every morning. What can I say? We are lazy farmers that like our sleep. And Mr. W likes projects that allow him to geek out.

The roof of the coop is "green" which will help keep it cool—and give us a little extra rosemary for the kitchen.

The greenhouse side of things is in full swing but still needs a real window on the south side. We'll add one when we swap out the windows in our house sometime later this year.

We may move the girls out to their coop later this week if the weather stays nice. I'm a little torn on how I feel about doing this. I'm looking forward to cleaning the inch of chicken-spawned dust that is currently coating every surface in the guest room, but I will definitely miss peeking in on them and hearing their little cheeping every time I walk down the hallway. Perhaps I'll buy chicken costumes for the cats to help me through the transition.

My all-time favorite thing the girls have been doing recently—and will continue to do as they grow to full size—is take sand baths. Apparently they like the feeling of grit between their feathers, so they completely go to town rolling around in their sandbox (an 8" x 12" Pyrex baking pan) and kicking up dust all over the place. They were lulled into an almost catatonic state of bliss last night after doing this for about 10 minutes. It's hysterical to watch.

A Progress Report

The girls are only a couple weeks old but are already losing their baby feathers and becoming daredevils with their fancy new wings.

In spite of the fact that we are very distracted by our new quadruplets, we've been making relatively steady progress on our house projects. We may even begin demo this week on the beloved seahorse bathroom. But first, we need to get a bit more done to the chicken run because, as you can see above, the girls are growing up fast.

Mr. W worked hard to dig about a 120-square foot ditch this weekend so we can bury the bottom of the run to prevent any critters from sneaking in and attacking our girls. We had our first weasel sighting in the yard this afternoon and although he was adorable (I literally thought someone's pet was loose in our yard) we don't want him coming back and going all True Blood on our chicks.

Coop progress. Run progress. Please disregard the fact that Mr. W's legs are the same color as his beige shorts. He's been locked in offices for quite awhile.

For some reason, I offered to help Mr. W dig yesterday and quickly remembered that back-breaking labor is just not my bag. Naive optimism ("I can totally help you dig that hole!") mixed with a short fuse ("This effing SUCKS!") can add up to a pretty lethal combination. Fortunately no one was injured by a flying pitchfork. I tried to hold it together but eventually Mr. W sent me into the front yard to pull weeds... He later informed me that, to him, shoveling dirt is equivalent to dancing (equally awful). Does not compute.

The greenhouse side of the coop is also coming along. We've painted the inside white and today Mr. W
started a bunch more seeds in there for one of our garden plots.

We've been trying to clear out the lower section of our front yard so we can add some plants and flowers around our new little collection of olive trees. And yes, we will attempt to make pickled olives down the line...

Feels pretty fancy to have our fountain hooked up again. Even though it's surrounded by landscape fabric and dirt.

The lower yard in the back is springing to life (pun intended) with cute baby veggie plants and an astronomical number of weeds. Mr. W was down there with the weedwhacker this weekend and lost his Fitbit in the greenery. After about fifteen minutes of fruitless searching, Mr. W got the brilliant idea to triangulate (his word) the location using the sync feature on his phone. Shortly thereafter, I found the Fitbit covered in a shreddy green film, but still in proper working order. We were both very relieved, as we've been locked in fierce "step count" competition ever since getting our Fitbits several weeks ago.

Our little corn is shooting up like crazy.

In addition to some pumpkin success, little volunteer zucchinis have appeared—and are already fruiting!

As you can see, the weeds have decided to swallow the yard whole.

The other highlight of our weekend arrived in the mail Friday, courtesy of my mother, AKA the grandchickens' grandmother. I made a joke about her knitting some scarves for them in the winter and instead she made them baby bonnets. We have yet to attempt a photo shoot with the girls, but I did snap this shot of their feline sister modeling one. Just another ordinary weekend at the Maris house...

This is only the beginning, my friends...

Weedwacking and West Nile Disease

Something has taken up residence in my stomach today and has forced me to be couch-bound with a cold washcloth on my forehead for most of the day. No, I'm not pregnant...it's not that kind of stomach bug...

Naturally, I decided that I probably contracted West Nile or Lyme Disease or some other bug-born illness from doing too much yard work and cleaning the garage (to make room for the new kitchen cabinets coming). Mr. W insists that I just have a wimpy immune system. But I don't know how that could be when this body kicked so much butt over the weekend.

On Saturday, Mr. W taught me how to use the weedwacker, and I took our side/garden yard from this:

To this:

It was sort of like vacuuming, but it smelled like green smoothies. My biceps vibrated for about 3 hours afterwards, but I felt so cool and accomplished, I didn't mind the pain.

I will say I wish the yard still looked like it did when Mr. W covered the ground with straw. But this whole country living thing is really just an ongoing battle between man and nature. We can't always win.

The good news is, the side yard has seen some exciting action over the last couple weeks. Our planter boxes sent up some teeny baby asparagus sprouts (which sadly we cut off because Farmer Maris said we had to).

And the strawberries are starting to flower.

In spite of being on its last legs, the little tree near the chicken coop has also produced some fruit. We're not sure whether they're apricots or peaches, but we'll take whatever we can get. (Isn't baby fruit just the cutest?)

The coop itself is also coming along very nicely—which is great because our chicks arrive in about 2 weeks. We just need to finish getting the metal siding up and construct the outdoor run and we'll be good to go. I'm sure Guinevere, Rosalind, Vivian, and Cecilia will be very comfortable there. Especially if Mr. W builds them a chicken swing.

In the lower yard, we planted enough to feed an army this summer. A variety of tomatoes, peppers, and squash, plus pumpkins, corn, and cantaloupe. Feel free to come over for dinner at your leisure...

Want to read about the Zen of gardening I recently discovered? Head over to The Path to Wonderful. 

We're Expecting...Chickens

An ad from Hobby Farms magazine. Yep, Mr. W has a subscription.

If you read here regularly, you already know that we're planning to get some chickens, and that we (and by we, I mostly mean Mr. Wonderful) have been building a chicken/coop greenhouse to hold them in our side yard. Mr. W has been researching chicken rearing for at least a year, and this weekend we took a humongous step toward having them: we ordered four. They should arrive at the end of April.

As soon as Mr. W clicked "submit" on the website, I felt nervous. Like we were pregnant with quadruplets. I even had a dream that night that we had a baby girl. Strangely, we had hired a surrogate to carry her, but then even more strangely, I was breastfeeding her. I know—I should probably call my old shrink. Clearly I need to work through some weird ass Freudian stuff... Anywhoo...

So now Mr. W has to try to get me up to speed on how to take care of our little feathered friends. He was reading in bed over the weekend, and shared these gems with me from one of his chicken books:

Source

Source

Source

The "Holding a Chicken Backwards" instruction is by far my fave. I'm totally going to have Mr. W take a picture of me carrying one of the girls like that. But first, we have to get through the baby stage.

Apparently the girls will be living indoors with us for about 5 weeks while they grow big enough to survive out in their coop. Of course I asked if they could sleep on our pillows and wake us up each morning with sweet little peeping sounds. Mr. W doesn't seem to think it would work quite like that...

It's a good thing we have so much time before they arrive because the coop still looks like this:

When it's finished, it should look like this:

 

The actual chicken run will be smaller, but the rest of the sketch is pretty accurate. Greenhouse on the south side, chicken coop on the east side, storage on the west side, and a roof garden on top.

In addition to counting down the days until the girls arrive, I'm counting the days until Mr. W is here fulltime. We only have about 3-ish more weeks to go. I cannot wait. I did the math recently and although we're coming up on our 3-year anniversary, we've lived apart for HALF of that time. We have a lot of newlywed shenanigans to catch up on. Let's just say the chickens won't be the only ones doing a lot of pecking around here...

Cooped Up

These girls live at a very cute store/succulent nursery nearby. I bet their names are
HENrietta and PECKnelope. And they've been friends since junior high.

When one's husband is temporarily living in another county, one finds it very easy to keep the house relatively tidy (one's own messes are invisible...) and also very easy not to leave said house. Thus creating an even keener awareness of where things "should" and "shouldn't" be in her castle.

Over Christmas break when Mr. W was here for two solid weeks, I had to reprogram myself after I short-circuited in response to his small abundance of random piles. You saw a sampling here...

The sock really does make the entire shot.

There was the RC helicopter hospital that took up residence on our dining room table, the miscellaneous mail, tools, nails, keys, and clothing items that lingered near the front door, the monstrous bag of receipts that threatened to overtake the couch...

Not being used to having someone else's stuff in my space, I had a minor freakout at him one day.
But as the vacation wore on, I realized something really important (after doing a little self coaching):
I would much rather have the stuff than the alternative. I'd much rather have Mr. W and his swirl of pigpen flotsam than no Mr. W at all. I'd rather have his mess in the house than not have him in the house.

It was a pretty powerful mindset shift.

But likely one I'll have to work to maintain when remodeling mayhem begins in a few months. Mr. W gave me a talk recently about how he would need to take some time off to recuperate after finishing the movie—so he wouldn't want to start renovating right away.

But the boy cannot sit still.

Case in point: he decided to start construction on the greenhouse/chicken coop over Christmas. Even though he knew that he wouldn't finish it and there would be many other projects needing to be done in the spring, he couldn't resist. I don't think he was at the house for a day before he headed to Home Depot and began plotting.

Here's a before shot of our side yard. We knew the killin' shed would need to come down
at some point. Hoping we won't have any Poltergeist situations...

When his BFF came to town for New Year's, they took sledgehammers to the shed and turned it into this. Another pile...

The yard itself went from this (I think Mr. W was secretly delighted that he had to purchase a new chainsaw to get that old stump out):

 

 To this (I learned this is "straw," not "hay." It's only hay when it's green, soft, and edible):

After that, construction began on the new foundation for the green-coop structure (If he lived here, I'd take a picture of the design sketch he created so you could see what it's supposed to look like when it's all done).

There he is, hard at work putting insulation under the foundation to keep the girls warm.

Finally, up came the framing for the walls. And the loose plans to install an electronic chicken door that lets the girls into their run every morning....

 

 That was as far as he got before he had to go back to LA for work. We're pretty excited he hit the wall stage. And I was slightly elated when he showed me some old horse shoes he discovered in the construction debris.

I have a feeling I'll need some extra luck to continue keeping my head right about the home and garden disarray. But it's better than the alternative...