Early Morning Visitor

There were three visitors at the bird feeder this morning slurping up bird seed.

This young buck was the only one bold enough to continue. 

I like how he is looking at me like.....

What?!

Our Pheasant friend is back too...

Homeschool Biology

We love homeschooling.

Where else can you hatch your own chicks and get credit for it.

I love that we can tailor our curriculum around the things that we want to learn about. When we started our adventure in raising our own chickens we began with eight chicks. The arecauna chick died twice. I know, your thinking how did that happen, how does a chick die twice. It does when you replace it. So we gave up on replacing that little gal. 

And then Victoria's little Rosie turned out to be a rooster.

So now we are down to six eggs a day.

And then our sweet Magdalena died on Christmas day of all days. We think she was egg bound.

Which puts us down to five eggs unless our prize egg layer, Henrietta, lays two a day which happens sometimes.

For school we got ourselves an incubator with an egg turner and a circulating fan.

We found out that we would have to turn them three times a day and the survival rate is improved with circulating air.

We started out the 21 day journey with 8 eggs but two of them didn't look fertilized so we carefully disposed of those after seven days.

I couldn't believe that at four days you could see blood vessels and a little chick body when the egg was candled with a flash light. And one of the chicks, Martha's (we know that because her eggs are speckled), did't really like the light shining in her eyes because she was swaying from side to side inside the egg. It was fascinating.

We are hopeful that they all make it and that they are all hens. Hopefully no more roosters. One is enough for our girls.

Stay tuned for hatch day!

April 3rd.

No Ordinary Snowman

Look closely....

Do you see it?

Okay, so you see that one of his eyes has fallen off....

Can you tell?

Every year a group of volunteers build this gigantic snowman in Logan canyon. 

They used ladders to reach the top.  It makes it into the Herald Journal and everything.

 He gets lots of visitors too.

Nana thinks that our family should help next year. We'll see.

When we lived in Arizona we would freeze our behinds off when temps dipped to the 60's and 70's outside. We thought it was a warm day while snowshoeing and it only reached 45 degrees. We had to take our sweatshirts off because the sun was so warm.

I think we're acclimated...