Ava's Eggs

This is my daughter, Ava, washing and drying her chicken eggs that she collects every day. It's like having an Easter Egg hunt in the coop on a daily basis. She looks forward to collecting, counting, washing, drying and packing the eggs in cartons, all by her little self. My husband built her a deluxe chicken coop and fenced the chickens in a 20'x20' area so they could have some room to roam. We ordered 15 chicks through the mail and one day in April we became the proud owners of 33 chicks. That's right, folks. There was a mix up in the chicken department at the farm that day and they sent us not one shipment, but two. We ordered a straight run of female Red Sex Link chickens. That's farmer talk for we ordered all females so we wouldn't have a rooster issue and Red Sex Links are the type of birds that we purchased. These chickens grow to a nice size and are good eatin' chickens when they have finished their egg laying duties, roughly a year or so after they start laying eggs. Their eggs are also brown eggs and are large to extra large in size, often producing double yokers (for you superstitous folks it looks like for my next pregnancy I will be carrying octuplettes).

I called the company and they were very apologetic however, they don't accept refunds in terms of chicks, so we had twice the amount that we really needed. This presented a problem when the box that we kept them in until they were big enough for the coop could only accomodate the number we ordered, not the number we received. Also, the company could not gurantee that the second batch of chicks that were sent were a straight run of females. So we ordered Raising Chickens for Dummies, this is a true statement, and began to look for signs of roosters in our brood.

Jim and the kids faithfully fed and watered the cute little buggers and wiped their little bums religiously so they didn't get backed up and sick until there was hardly any room in the box for them all. We then gave them away to a couple of nearby thankful farmers who put the chickens to good use on their own farms. Raising chickens has became quite a nice hobby for our family. And it's amazing how thankful you can be for something as simple as an egg. When we go out to the coop and lift the lid of the nesting boxes and see all of those eggs waiting for us, we turn and say, "Thanks girls!" before they start pecking at our toes.