February 2012: The Arrival Of The Puffballs.
These little guys are just absurdly cute. For the first couple of days, it was really hard to keep from just sitting & staring at them & pointing out incessantly how cute they were. Well, more than a week in, & we still kind of do that. How did we end up living in Cute City? Well, it all began one early January Saturday morning sitting around drinking coffee & reading the Murray McMurray Hatchery online catalog. Or did it begin with my picking up the excellent book Farm City by Novella Carpenter & falling in love with the idea of a box of baby poultry arriving via the U.S. Mail? Or did it simply begin last December when I emailed about a seemingly perfect craigslist rental that came complete with a chicken coop?
No, it all truly began much much earlier in time, when I met, started dating, & then married a guy as into or even possibly more so, crazy garden & farm plans as I am.
From the day we met we wanted to do this, & so what, if on that fateful January morning it seemed totally insane? So what if we already had four chickens, & the money we spent on the chicks could have been better employed elsewhere.
Spring is the season for chicks. We, by some very lucky twist of fate, ended by living somewhere we could have baby chicks just in time to place our order. How could we not? If you asked us in early December, we would have said sadly that we were at least a year, if not years, away from this project.
Look at us now. Lucy, Amanda Jo, Miranda, & Lulu outside in the chicken run, & an assortment of Barred Rocks, Araucanas, Golden Campines, Black Australorps, Partridge Rocks, & Sliver Laced Wyandottes currently chirping away in a brooder in our second bedroom.
We started with 27, but we lost one on the second day. Very sad especially considering it was a trying day during which I mostly focused on coming home to baby chicks, so finding that sad little body was quite a blow, but a week later the other 26 are still going strong.
It is really amazing to watch them grow. In just a week & a day, they have gone from little balls of fluff to much more bird like creatures, with wings & the tiniest most adorable tail feathers you ever saw. Their tail feathers kill me. Seriously.
If this post has a point beyond the obvious fact that omg, baby chicks are cute, it is that sometimes you have to just take a risk & go for the things that you know you want in your life. You can't just wait around to make enough money to afford your dream life later, sometimes you just have to go for it, & buy those baby chicks even though we knew we'd need that money down the road.
I don't regret it. Just now I took a break from writing this post to go outside & shut up the outdoor chickens in their coop for the night, & I can't properly express how happy the chicken tasks make.
In the last couple of weeks I have been reading the books & blog of Jenna Woginrich & I hate to use the word inspiring, but they really have been.
Big shout out to the farm & garden & food sections of the Forbes Library of Northampton for making us not even miss tv or netflix online or hulu during the almost two months we have lived here.
Turns out, I love having farm chores. My days are more fulfilling with chickens. I am happier here than I have maybe ever been, scary finances or not. We are on the right track.
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