Me, I am my kids' teacher

Those words were on the bottom of a poster that hung in my childhood room. I would study it during dozing off and waking up times and count the letters of the words and look at the tiny chicks in the barnyard scene surrounding a little golden lab puppy. I had this elaborate head game of counting the number of letters in words, names, sentences, and a scoring system in which anything that ended in the number EIGHT was the best.

But I digress (11 letters. bad).

Peep Peep Peep has moved in. (But no PUP). Didn't I just laud Webkinz in the post just previous to this. The inanimate, virtual, carefree sort of pet?

How then, could it happen that the very next day after the Webkin post, we drove in our real car using real expensive gasoline to pick up our real batch of 30 chicken eggs to incubate?

I thought it would be a great educational experiment. Easy: Put the eggs under a light. Watch them for a couple of days. Experience the miracle of life through hatching. Cheer on our chicks. Nurture them. Find a farm for them to live. It would be just like the fair where they have those large incubators with glass walls and chicks were hatching all of the time. Cool.

My first lesson in chicken incubation was that it takes real 21 days for our peepers to hatch. I am such a city girl sometimes (who actually grew up in the country with a mother who liked to raise chickens from time to time).

Until then, we must turn the eggs THREE TIMES A DAY ... ensure their incubator remains a steady 99 degrees, and to keep it humid. Sounds like the vacation I'd like to have (with a swim up bar, of course).

Did I say we have to turn those eggs three times a day? For 21 days?

It's day three. And so far, we are remembering. We are logging our progress, checking the temperature, the humidity. We are learning new terms like chalazae, albumen and candler. A candler, by the way, is a contraption with a light and a box that we need to make in order to view the inside of our eggs in a few days to check fertility and check development! And see whether we'll be expecting 30 peeps ... or fewer.

The eggs have been named things like Speckly, George and Duke. And Grant has shed tears more than once when we remind him that we will NOT be keeping the 30 (or?) chickens. It breaks city ordinances. And our neighbor would turn us in. Not that I wouldn't like to try to keep them! Our own eggs (for eating)!

Anyone know of a farmer who needs chickens? We wouldn't mind taking a trip out to the country for delivery. Think of the educational opportunity.

Candling update coming up.

Posted in: on Friday, March 28, 2008 at at 6:17 PM