Photo Friday [82]

The most exciting thing at our house this week has been chickens.

I never would have guessed how difficult it would be to acquire laying hens here.  After all, you see chickens all over the place.  After our first two attempts to acquire hens fell through, our friend who was buying them for a few different families got a lead on a local village that had black Australorp hens for sale (a dual purpose breed that is good for laying and meat).  We ordered four.  To our surprise, our friend came back with just three nondescript village chickens... which he had to pay twice the price we originally were planning to buy hens for.  Since there were three families wanting hens, we got one.  

Greg immediately named her Gina, and camped out in front of the coop, waiting for her to lay an egg.

Being a village chicken, Gina is pretty flighty, and totally ignored the commercial chicken feed we set out for her.  So we fed her kitchen scraps and let her roam around the yard to eat bugs.

Ah!  The first egg!  Greg is very into the chickens.  Caleb, I think, has an attitude more like our dog's... he thinks chasing them would be fun.

By the end of the week, however, we were able to acquire three more pullets to complete our little flock.  They are supposedly Australorp crosses, so hopefully they will be better layers than Gina (who I also suspect is not exactly a "spring chicken," as they say...).  It'll be a few months before we get any eggs from them.  Greg has named the orange one Shooting Star and the white one Snow.  I am allowed to name the black one, but I haven't chosen a name yet.  (I only get to name one, so I have to make it good!)  Any suggestions?

In other news:

 Over the weekend Brian brought us a scoop of topsoil for the flower bed.

 The man in his element.

 Kate was thrilled to try out mom's biscotti.  She is very eager to start eating grown-up food.

 Greg started drawing people!  This probably isn't as exciting for you as it is for me, but up until a few months ago, Greg hated drawing and only ever produced scribbles.  Suddenly he has decided he likes it and is producing pictures with recognizable objects.

A fine afternoon with nothing better to do, so I took some photos of Kate.  (Of course, while I was occupied in the back yard with the baby another child knocked over our water filtration system and broke two $70 filters... but at least I got some cute photos, right?)

See you next week!