Chickens

Sunday was a much quieter day compared to our busy Sunday. For the most part we stayed at home. LiAM was feeling quite worn out from being at the rodeo (and he did 20000 steps on Saturday, so figured he could sit still all day on Sunday and still have 10000 steps per day for the weekend) and watched a fair bit of tv and played Plants v Zombies and Lego Harry Potter. He and Millie also played Minecraft for a while.

3 new chicks were hatched early in the morning, 2 black and 1 yellow (we have SO many black chickens now). They were still in a laying box in the main pen, so we needed to move them to the chick pen. I put on long sleeves and gloves as Darkness, the mother, is quite vicious when she has chicks (actually she's vicious most of the time, just more so (understandably) when she has chicks. We had another hen (Snowy) have chicks in December and although she's very protective, and a very big hen, she's way less scary than Darkness). I grabbed Darkness out of her box and Millie carried the chicks one at a time to the new pen and I popped the mum in with them. It all went pretty smoothly (although one chick fell under the hay in the new box and couldn't get out, so I braved Darkness again and went in and rescued it, and rearranged the hay a little so that it was unlikely to happen again. Later in the day I went to check on them and one of the chicks had become stuck under the bottom bar of the pen. Trying to rescue her I got a sharp bite from Darkness - but I got the chick out and she looks ok.

Apart from chick wrangling I spent most of the day pottering around and catching up a bit on my general tidying. In the afternoon Tony took Caitlin to meet a friend at Healesville pool, and Millie went next door to see our neighbour. LiAM and I stayed home and watched some Green Lantern and a couple of other shows.  Caitlin's friend came home with her for tea, and then it was organised for her to stay overnight. The girls played Lego Harry Potter with LiAM, jumped on the trampoline, went for a bike ride, played on the iPad, chatted lots and had a fun evening.

When they put the chickens to bed they discovered that Snowy and her batch of chicks were not in the main pen - I'd hoped that when she couldn't get into the chick pen (because Darkness was shut in there) she'd take her brood into the main pen. We lost 2 chickens probably to foxes earlier this week when they didn't get shut away, so I really didn't want to leave a hen and 5 little chicks out. I searched for ages and eventually found them all tucked in between our brick pile and the shed, she was quite well hidden. I had all the kids help me - once again I grabbed the (shrieking) mother and the kids grabbed the 5 chicks and we safely moved them all into the main pen.

After all the chicken excitement we all got ready for bed (it was quite late by now anyway) and wandered off one or 2 at a time.