Introducing our Chicks!

We got chicks!! 6 to be exact. (the limit for inside our city limits permit.) So, of course I must blog about this. 🙂 So we have a brand new category here at His Mercy is New: Chickens!! Woo-hoo! It’s a little bit crazy how excited I am about this. And just so you know from the start, I’m mostly a “city girl” never having lived on a farm or anything of the sort. We grew up without any pets generally. I was never even interested in this “kind of life.” ha!!

But, I got to thinking yesterday about WHY I feel this excitement and the desire to have some of these changes in our home and lives. There are several reasons. I want my kids to have animals. I want them to learn to help care for them. I want them to learn responsibility. And each and every pet we’ve ever had has brought such JOY to our home!! So, that’s just a bonus to all we are learning, right!?

Also, another aspect of the chickens is that we will be raising them for their eggs. The more I read about our food and what is done to it, put in it, processed and everything else, the more I want to do myself or know exactly where it comes from!! Eggs are so good for you, so this will be awesome to have HEALTHY eggs that we know exactly where they are coming from and what the chickens are being fed, etc. Having our own chickens will be more frugal than buying the best quality, organic eggs that I want to feed our family. Not to mention more fun! 🙂

We are obviously learning as we are going…but we have done a lot of reading – books and online. So, I hope to share a little bit of what we’ve learned to document all of this!!

Here is a picture of our indoor set-up!! We have a heat lamp over them right now, it is around 100 degrees in there! We also have water and chick starter for them. We think they will be indoors for a few weeks before moving outside! If you rememeber, we also have 2 cats and a dog! So, at times we aren’t around or are gone, we are putting them in the bathroom with the door shut. On days like today, they are out with us in the school/play room where we can keep a close eye on our other friendly creatures. It is starting to really feel like a cRaZY farm around here. 🙂

Finally, my awesome husband is building our coop!! And he is using our old swing set!! He is amazing! He is not a natural handy-man, but he loves to learn to do things around the house and so this was his spring adventure. I’m so proud of him! He has put in a lot of hours figuring out the design and how to do it all.  Here you can see a little bit of the progression…I’ll have to look around for an old picture of our swing set to show you sometime.

So, if you have chickens I would LOVE to hear from you! Are we doing anything wrong? Any tips for me? What do you love most about your girls??