Easter, Water Balloons and Chicken Coop Surprises

Hellllllooooooo!!!! Anybody still out there????  Yes, I know it's been ages since my last post here, approximately 1 month ago today.  We've been so busy around here - with tax time, Easter and new ventures - there hasn't been a dull moment!

This Easter was one of the best ever - great times with family we hadn't seen in a long time and lots of fun! Including a water balloon fight and a game of Hammerschlagen where my mother-in-law put all the Voelkel men to shame - it's definitely a game that we will continue to play at family functions :)

Yesterday we received a late Easter present from the Easter bunny - or well, Easter Chicken, I guess you would say :)  You see, our chickens have been laying eggs for a while now, but we haven't had the chance to eat the eggs because they've been on medicated feed.  They were about to be off that feed when we decided to purchase some chicks (now officially called the McNuggets and they will be featured in a post of their own very soon!) from our local feed store over a month ago - and then when we integrated the chicks in the coop with the older chickens, the older chickens began eating medicated feed too.  So all this time, there have been some hens sitting on a bunch of eggs.

They take turns sitting while the other goes and eats - and we haven't really thought much of it.  We figured they were going to be good mothering hens - so we've just let the eggs stay in - plus, if you've ever tried to pry a sitting hen away from her eggs - she'll peck you pretty good!  So yesterday Brad was ready with a stick to try to pry these hens out of the hen box.  We wanted to get those eggs out and be able to start fresh....well, what do you know - look what he found!

That's right - these baby chicks had just hatched, either Sunday evening or Monday morning.  They're so cute and just about as big as a large cotton ball.  We scratched our heads and wondered what in the world should we do.  So we decided to remove one of the hens and her chicks and put them together and leave the other hen to finish hatching the remaining eggs.  We thought, oh, there looks to be about 4 or 5 chicks in there - but to our shock, when the first hen was removed - there were TEN!!!!!!

Now the momma and her chicks are staying comfortably on our porch in a dog kennel with fluffy shavings where she's teaching them to peck feed and drink water.

And since I was out in the chicken coop yesterday with my camera, I decided to show you the progress of our garden - remember, way back when we had seedlings growing in our house?  Well, here's what some of the plants look like today.

Sweet corn 

Yellow Squash

I can't wait for those tomatoes to start turning red so I can eat them!  The unique smell of the tomato plants immediately takes me back to being a little girl on my grandparents farm.