We do not have anything exciting to blog. Homeschooling is going well, with "A" in 3rd grade and "B" almost done with Kindergarten. I thought she'd be done by now and well into first grade, but we are moving a little slower with her than "A" - it's just easier to balance that way. I always thought we'd try to make homeschooling fun, but really it's just as hard as school outside the home because we actually do "school at home". Oh well. Maybe it will be easier and more fun when "A" stops resisting and insisting she needs help with every little thing just to get me to sit next to her while she does it. There are 2 other children in this house and a whole house that doesn't clean itself, but she doesn't care - it's outside the realm of third grade mentality. She just knows that she wants attention and mom isn't giving it to her. I guess we are still figuring out how to balance and disseminate attention for each one.

I just received info from the U of I Extension Office about chick hatching in 2009. There is also a butterfly and sewing program (not sewing butterflies - 2 separate programs.) I'll have to figure out which activities we will do in 2009!

We raised butterflies (painted lady) and had 5 of 5 hatch. One had it's wing mangled when it got caught in it's own weblike stuff from before it formed the crysalis and it dried all funky, but it survived and was able to fly, sort of, when we let them go. It was great and a lot of fun, but very hard to photograph.

Our chick brooder box has been lent out to 2 different families who each received a mixture of eggs, so their chicks were various breeds, not all white leghorns like ours. I will seriously consider that option for next year! It would be a lot of fun to hatch chickens that are all different colors and maybe have funky feathers on their heads! We'd also return them to the farmer who provided the eggs, which would be a whole lot easier that making other arrangements.

Anyway, our school year is off to a good start with one in 3rd grade at home and another in kindergarten/1st grade at home. Along with using Alpha-Omega's Switched on Schoolhouse program (an old version we were given by someone else), we are also making science notebooks this year. So far we have completed pages for cheetah and lemur. Did you know that cheetah's are the fastest of the big cats and have the telltale characteristic of long teardrop markings at the outer edge of their eyes? That's one way they can be distinguished from other similar big cats. One daughter has decided she would like a lemur for a pet, but they prefer to live in Madagascar.

Things I would have done differently

OK, I know I said the last entry would be my last one about chicks, but I wanted to set this apart for anyone who is doing this type of project and would like to know ahead of time, what I wish we had done differently.

1. I would have ordered 12 eggs instead of 36. We had never done this before and I was just thinking that a full dozen for each child would be fun. Because I turned them most of the time and they got so crammed in the Brooding Box, a dozen would have been fine. We had no idea what to expect and wanted to improve our chances of a good hatch rate. Now we know that 12 eggs is enough for us.
2. When the eggs are numbered and placed in the incubator, I would have weighed each one and recorded the weight for a baseline measurement.
3. I would have candled over 2 or 3 days so I could candle all of them – and done this both times we candled.
4. At the second candling session, I would have weighed each egg, and weigh again the day we prepare the incubator for hatching.
5. When removing hatched chicks from the incubator, I would check the level of humidity (either with a device or just by adding water) in order to avoid a chick drying inside the shell, like Flopper.
6. I would try to predict, based on the weight and candling, which eggs would hatch.
7. I would open the un-hatched eggs 24 hours after the last chick hatched and record the level of development found inside the egg.

That’s it, those are my recommendations. If you are getting ready to do this – HAVE FUN! We loved it and plan to do it again. If you are squeamish or don’t like to wash your hands frequently, this may not be the project for you. Even if you don’t help any chicks hatch, you will have to clean the incubator after, which will have all the broken shells and pieces of membrane strewn about. Also, keep in mind that if you don’t help one hatch who needs help, you will have to listen to it peep until it dies. Helping it is no guarantee either, you may open the shell to find blood inside, meaning it wasn’t really ready to hatch and it will die anyway. You may even find that it hadn’t absorbed the yoke and now you have a chick that isn’t fully developed and it will die, too. It doesn’t always go as smoothly as ours did. Be ready for anything.

Our Last Chick Entry

This will probably be our last entry about the chicks… not necessarily the last entry ever, because we are now observing butterflies emerging from their chrysalis and I’m sure we will have other projects after that. However, I will try to get everything in here about the chicks.

We delivered the remaining 14 chicks to their farm on Sunday. It’s a dairy farm and they will be free range chickens once they are old enough to roam the farm. They were almost 3 weeks old, so they still have some more time under the warming lights and then they’ll roam in the barn until they are old enough to roam the farm.

One had really started to develop rooster-ness. He was the biggest, puffed out his chest, and had developed the most full-grown characteristics. On that same note, I’m thinking that Flopper may be a she. Either that or just slower to develop.

Here is a picture of Flopper the night before (s)he went to live on the farm.

It was a sad day for everyone. “A” cried and had a hard time saying good-bye. We have pictures, but won’t post them because it was a sensitive time. “C” still asks about the “chickies” every day. It’s hard to know what goes through “B’s” mind and she talks about it very little. I’ll have to try to get her to tell me what she thinks about the whole project.


I’ve been meaning to record the hatching information for each egg and some other meaningless stats. So here goes:

The eggs that did NOT hatch, were # 11, 14, 17, 28, 34, and 35.

Child C had eggs 1-12, the best hatch rate: 11 hatched: 92%
Child B had eggs 13-24, the second best: 10 hatched: 83%
Child A had eggs 25-36, the third best: 9 hatched: 75%
Overall: 83% hatched, 81% survived.

Eggs that hatched:
Monday, May 5th: 22, 23, 33
Tuesday between midnight and 9:30 am: 2, 3, 4, 7, 10, 12, 13, 16, 19, 20, 21, 25, 27, 30, 36
Tuesday between 9:30 am & 2 pm: 1, 5, 6, 8, 15, 18, 26, 32
Tuesday after 2 pm: 9, 24, 31
Wednesday morning with our help: Flopper was in egg #29

Becoming Chickens

Here is a picture of Flopper from a week ago. You can see his crooked toe that sets him apart from the others. He’s also a bit smaller than the others.

They are really looking pretty funny losing all their baby feathers and growing into their full chicken feathers. I'll have to get a picture in the next day or two. We are sort of hoping we won’t be able to take them to their farm until we can see which are roosters and which are hens. Around 3 weeks they should be showing us. If we take them this weekend, they will be just a few days shy of 3 weeks old. Hopefully a few will be early developers…

Pictures of the first 15 to go home

Here are some pictures of the first 15 to go to their farm. You can start to see the wing feathers changing.

Flopper's Alive!

It took me a day or so, but I was able to identify Flopper as one of the 14 remaining chicks in our possession. His toes are straightening out, so it's getting harder and harder to spot him, but he also has a slight bald spot on his back where his feathers were pulled out when we peeled the shell off of him. He is also a bit skinnier than the others.

Boy do they go through food fast!

I changed the litter to a regular small animal pine litter and there is no more smell. Previously I was using some organic stuff that felt like hemp. I don't remember exactly what it was, but the small package cost the same $10 as the HUGE package of pine litter. I'll forfeit the environment this time for the sanity of the family and the smell in our house. Who’d have thought that trying to go green would smell so bad?

I have to feed the chicks 2-3 times a day (using an egg carton for a food dish) and change the water 2-3 times each day. They get so much bedding in the water that they can’t drink. And when we look in or open the cage, the chicks are so scared, it’s no wonder their called “chicken”, um, er, maybe that’s why chicken is another word for being scared…

Oh, and did I mention that I think we have a rooster? Well, it wouldn’t be a surprise. With 14 chicks, there’s bound to be at least one rooster. It doesn’t crow, it peeps – at the crack of dawn… I hear this, LOUD, “peep, peep, PEEP, PEEP” early in the morning. It’s kind of funny.