Animal Projects

We brought our day-old pullets home on April 29, and kept them in a box in the kitchen for nearly 6 weeks under a heat lamp. That would be exactly 38 days for anyone who was counting. Uhhh, that would be me, of course.














Being new to the chick thing, I never assumed these TINY little birds could be so capable of turning my living area into the equivalent of a smelly horse stable, but it did prompt Daddy to immediately begin the task of building a shelter for the chickens...

and the bunnies.

Yes, ALL nineteen of them; two mothers and their seventeen babies that arrived in May, five weeks too early and fifteen kits too many, after the owner informed me of his lung cancer diagnosis. Instead of picking out 3 eight week-old rabbits from the two litters in July, we took home the entire bunny bunch and set them upon the porch, which, by the way, did not fair well for us in the scorching temperatures of summer. 19 rabbits urinating and defecating upon the concrete does not create a pleasant smell, especially when the winds kick up in the direction of your windows, but especially after walking through the front door to escape the fumes of the porch, only to have the aroma of chicken crap slap you smack in the face.

Dad said he always use to dream of having animals and being a farmer. I think he may have changed his mind somewhere in between the months of April and May. I believe we were both probably thinking we'd rather starve to death if the only alternative in the near future to obtaining food was growing/raising it ourselves.




















The children, however, were so taken with the animals that I considered as I watched them care for these babies, that perhaps this was one clock we might not wish to turn back.