Wattle We Do Now

Doodle

So here's the long and short of it: we have eight roosters.  Eight.  Eight out of our ten little chicks are roosters.  Yes, we paid for five sexed hens.  Yes, we took our chances on the other five. We figured one or two of the straight run chicks would be hens and we'd have just a few roosters to "process."  Boy, it's been an adventure.  It's like a soap opera around here and chickens are in all the starring roles.

Let's back up a little.  Getting the coop finished was a major project, but once completed we felt that he hard part was over.  We were always trying to figure out which of our fowl were boys and which were our future egg layers, but it's much more complicated that one might think.  Because we had a variety of breeds we couldn't easily compare them to each other.  People say to look at the size of the wattle or comb, check for pointy feathers and listen for the tell tale crow.  As our chickens grew and we started to notice that the vast majority of them looked (and sounded) like roosters, we dug deeper into our research.  "Yes," said someone on the backyard chickens forum, "I have a hen who crows."  Yes, another added, sometimes hens have huge combs.  Because we were working with the assumption that we definitely had five hens, it became very hard to discern which were the ladies, because they all seemed like roosters.

When it became too obvious to ignore (and it took us a while to get there), we concluded that we had, in fact, been feeding and caring for our dinner for the past five months.  Bummer.  Our two little hens were no match for the roosters.  We had to eliminate some roos.

Now, don't get me wrong, we've enjoyed these roosters.  They are facinating creatures.  We watched as Doodle became the alpha chicken and saw the others fall in line.  We studied pecking order by leaving the alpha locked up while the other roamed free and watched how the roos aggressively mated the poor hens.  We learned a lot about chickens.  It's been a great learning project.  We would not, however, choose to raise roosters again.  We just want some darn eggs!

  

We knew from the start that we wouldn't be keeping the roosters, but Kenzie didn't know exactly what we would be doing with them.  We didn't want to kill any chickens until she had a chance to say goodbye (she's not good with surprises).  We explained how the meat came from the chickens by equating it the meat Dustin gets when he guts a fish.  Kenzie has watched him take apart fish many times so we knew she could understand the basics of where the meat came from.  We weren't certain, though, how she would react to losing the chickens.  They have, after all, been raised as our pets, unlike the anonymous bass that shows up in the cooler after Dustin's been gone for the day.  

Mean Chicken

So, it was with hesitation that we asked her to say goodbye to Doodle (the alpha) and Mean Chicken (the mean one).  We were shocked when she ran to the sliding door and in her most playful voice sang out a phrase we have never before heard her say.  With great joy she yelled,  "Dooooooodle!  We're gonna eat you up!"  Should we be worried?  

Kenzie is THREE!

Okay, she's been three for over a two months now,  but it's not too late to share.  We celebrated her birthday with a rainbow-themed party.  She mentioned months ago that she wanted rainbows for her birthday and I liked the idea so much that I reminded her weekly so she wouldn't change her mind.  We enjoyed a nice get-together with family and Kenzie had a great time.

It's crazy, but three seems so much older than two.  She's becoming more inquisitive everyday and she really keeps us on our toes.  Sometimes I get to the point where I have to tell her "no more questions" until we get in the car/ sit down to dinner/ until morning etc.  It's so hard to complete a task with a toddler firing questions at me.

We love that she's so curious, though.  She really thinks deeply about things and continues to surprise us with where her thoughts take her.  For example, one time we were coming home from the grocery store and saw a man cutting tree limbs from a cherry picker. The questions started coming.  Everything from who is he to what color is the knife (you know, the one he cuts with). Then, when I thought the Q and A session was over and we'd shared a couple minutes of silence she asked, "Mommy, does the cutter do other work too, like clean the kitchen?"

In the past year McKenzie has reached some major toddler milestones.  She is now completely potty-trained (even at night), no longer uses a pacifier, and she goes to sleep in a "big girl bed" (although she usually ends up on the floor next to her big girl bed). Even though she often seems wise beyond her years, she often reminds us that she's only three.  You know, when she melts down because she wanted more milk in her cereal and we told her she has enough, or when she screams at bedtime because she's "not tired." Ahh, toddlerhood.

McKenzie continues to be a kind, loving, smart, curious, thoughtful, funny, adorable little girl.  We are so proud.

Conversations with Kenzie

McKenzie: Mommy, I can be a hee yaw thing?
Me: You mean a cowgirl?
McKenzie: Yeah.

Crazy Sister Love

The girls are playing together more and more often now and it is so sweet to see how they love each other.

Notice in the middle when I told Kaia she can't pull Kenzie's hair?  Yeah, I used to tell her no.  That was until I caught Kenzie asking Kaia to pull her hair.  Now, Kenzie is on her own!

Rain Rain

It's been a rainy week here and instead of wallowing in self pity we decided to make the most of the day when the skies finally cleared.  The girls got good and muddy playing in the puddles around the yard.  With the exception of one major digger causing Kaia's lip to bleed (nothing the Boo-Boo Bunny couldn't handle) it was a great outdoor adventure.

Darn Tootin'

The chicken coop is done and our little ladies (and a few little men too, we suspect) are living happily out in the yard.  We've been learning all we can about chicken farming and are reading a lot of interesting things online these days.  Did you know that a hen's eggs will be the same color as her ear lobes?  Did you know that as soon as we learned this we had to Google: "where are a chicken's ear lobes?"  Oh yeah, they have ears, and lobes too.  The other night I found myself reading  a blog post titled "Wattle I do for love."

When Dustin builds something he builds it right.  He researched chicken coops for a month before breaking ground on this project.  The end result is an attractive, safe, highly functional home for our new pets.  The door over the nesting boxes opens so it will be easy to retrieve the eggs every day.  

Kenzie helped paint it, and she actually painted quite a bit.  We thought she'd lose interest after a few minutes but she ended up painting both of the removable sides (and parts of her body).

This is her posing-for-a-picture smile.

It wasn't that hot, but she was working hard.

Caught red-handed.

Now that they are accustomed to where their home is we can let them loose in the yard.  We did this hesitantly the first time but countless websites assured us that when dusk settles they will find their way home to roost.  Guess what?  It's true.  All ten were perched in the coop by 7:30 so we could lock them safely in their home.  It's almost too easy.

Kenzie could watch them all day long (and so could Dustin and I if we didn't have other pressing things to do, like, say, work and keep house and, well,  be normal).    We hope that they will start laying eggs by mid June.  More pictures and videos to come.

Kaia is ONE!

Kaia turned one last weekend and it gave me an opportunity to put my new Pinterest addiction to good use. Complete with tissue paper pom poms and personalized banners we celebrated Kaia's big milestone with over 60 people at our home.  Kaia continues to be the happiest, most personable baby on the block.  She was handed around all afternoon and never fussed.  She loved her first cupcake (though admittedly not her first sugary treat) and really seemed to enjoy being surrounded by our family and friends.

She wasn't at all overwhelmed by her birthday song.

I'm still cleaning up from the party and there are balloons and other decorations throughout our house.  Kenzie's birthday is this weekend, so half the work is done already for her party.

Pom poms are the gift that keeps giving...

Kenzie was an early talker (and she hasn't stopped since) and she seems to have taught little Kaia to follow her lead.  Kaia says nearly ten words consistently and tries new ones every day.  The last post showed Kaia's first steps.  After that day she seemed to make a conscious decision that she was going to stop crawling and be a full-time walker.  It was sometimes painful to watch how long it took her to get from point A to point B, but no matter how many times she fell she never crawled.  She would get back to her feet and keep trudging on.  Now she walks like a pro.  She has a bright, warm personality that makes it impossible to be in a foul mood when she's around.  She's our little troublemaker, too, always running to the stairs, toilet, dog food, etc whenever she sees an opportunity.

Some of Kaia's other talents include:

• understanding simple requests like "throw the ball," "give this to Daddy," "lets to find big sister," "that's too big, spit it out."
• dancing to the music.  Any noise can entice her to bounce up and down.
• hugging.  She will give hugs upon request and loves to hug her stuffed animals and Kenzie's babies.
• saying hi, whoa, Kona, ball, Daddy, water (wawa), arf arf (you know, what a dog says), and eat.
• signing more, all done, milk, eat, and water.
• finding her belly and toes.  She likes to eat her toes so we ask her to do that all the time (it's too cute).
• making us all laugh at her dinner table shenanigans.  She holds onto her tray with both hands and shakes her head (along with the rest of her body) yelling "ahhhhhh" the whole time.  The more we laugh the more she does it.  
• stopping to smell the flowers.  Although actually smelling things will take a while, right now she blows out her mouth when she "smells."  She smells real flowers and pictures of flowers in her books.
• climbing the stairs quickly.  Too quickly.  If we forget to put a gate up she knows it and will be on stair three (at least) before we can get to her.  (We could leave the stairs ungated with Kenzie because she had no interest in climbing.)
• doing laps.  She walks in laps around the kitchen island, and when she gets bored with that she does laps around the dining room table.  Seriously, the girl walks miles each day.
• "helping" me do the laundry or throw things in the trash.  She gets really excited to throw her dirty diapers in the trash.  
• making everyone smile.  She is a bright light in our lives, there's no doubt about it.