LOOK WHAT WE HATCHED!
The incubator, full and warming a steady 99.5 degrees as we checked it daily, right in our living room.
Would you let these people handle fragile eggs with growing embryos daily??
The warm new nest for the new babies, ready and waiting, Martin set it up when the first hatchling was imminent...I was so excited and nervous, almost just like my own births!
The waiting and watching and listening to the movement of the hatching eggs was difficult to bear. He did his best and sat with me on the couch. 
I was so anxious, nervous even, that I had a stomachache! I had to park on the couch for some rest time as we waited, and waited and listened.
And finally...there he/she was! He/she was still when we opened the lid and we all stared at each other locked in silence.
Unsteady and wet but warming nicely in the warm, cushy chickie bed...
You can see where the yolk was attached to the inside of the shell with tiny blood vessels visible too. 
We decided he/she needed some sunny dry time after an hour or so of birth, we could not resist him!! Mamas and daddies know how it is with your first baby!
And, before long, a passel of chicks! So, so much fun you would not even believe! Our every day was permeated with sweet cheeps and visiting them, feeding them, loving them, right in my living room.********************************************
It is 7am. (I wrote most of this letter the morning after they went to their new home.)
I think I still hear them behind the whir of the washing and drying machines. the faint "cheep, cheep" that may be coming from the trees just outside or from the grass, as they slurp morning dew or find insects jumping.
I had watched "The Natural History of the Chicken" on Netflix streaming some time last year. We watched it again with our project...lots of interesting lore and truth on ...chickens. I know and, have explained in a general way why we buy the chickens the way we do to the children, the inhumane and dirty practices of the big commercial chicken farms by watching other documentaries such as "Food, Inc." on Netflix and for several years now, we have been purchasing our meats through a local co-op found here: http://www.localharvest.com/ that orders poultry specifically from Fran's Fryers, read more about their procedures here. You can find a similar producer from localharvest.com for your family.
I like it because I know these birds are clean. I know they get to eat bugs. I know their feed is non-GMO and they are humanely harvested the old fashioned way. As a child for one Easter, my sister and I each received a two or three week old chick. I still remember that we kept them in a box in the garage. I don't remember caring for it, watering and feeding it, or changing the newspaper and leaf debris or straw in the box as we did here but I do remember my chick moved to my grandmother's house in Conroe and grew to be a mean spirited rooster we all called, for better or for worse, "Traci Rooster". I also recall chasing the chickens in my grandmother's yard...that was fun. There ends my short history of interaction with chickens. Well, besides the fact that I am an avid consumer of the meat and eggs like many people.
Now, as a homeschooling mother, I get a chance to dig into things that I did not quite get to know enough about before and I am motivated by my curious children as most mother's will be, and therefore, always on the lookout to explore something new together. Aha, chickens, a science project! Let's go!
My friend who runs our local co-operative, Marilyn or Miss Marilyn, as the children say, knew I wanted to incubate my own eggs. She keeps a coop and sells her eggs on co-op days so this would help her out too. We talked about it several times and she had provided the opportunity to other homeschool families in our co-op. In time, it came together and one afternoon, on June 8th, she arrived with a brand new, hand turn incubator and approximately 40, hopefully fertilized, fresh chicken eggs.
Marilyn told me about the incubator, left the owner's manual, stressed we would need to hand turn all the eggs 2 to 4 times per day. No problem, right? ahem...well, more on that one...
We set it up and it took the rest of the day, over the next 8 hours or so, to get the temperature just right, 99.5 degrees and steady in the incubator, meanwhile, I left the eggs in the garage to keep them warm. Actually, now that I think about it, I left them on our counter and then later to the garage as I had underestimated how long it would take to get that incubator to a steady temp. That night, before bed, I loaded them in and it all began.
In the ensuing days and weeks to follow, we calculated the due date. If chickens take 21 days to hatch and we got ours started on June 8th, I estimated the chickie due date to be June 28th so we planned to stop turning the eggs a few days prior to allow them to "position" themselves for hatching. That day was a Tuesday but we know, due dates are approximate, and in keeping true to that fact, our first chick was born on Sunday, June 26th..Gunnar found him just after he emerged and names him "James". After that, Winston named the next one "Tom" and then I named the third, I decided it was a girl "Pearl". There were six born overnight and as Martin took the incubator and the box upstairs to our bedroom for the night, I played chicken midwife all night long...happily. I named one more a girl name "Lavinia" and then quite lost track of who was whom. In the night, I got up each time to check on the newly hatched to see it and then would leave it to warm up, recover and stretch until the next hatchling and when I would I would check that one, I would put the earlier born one into the hatch box with the others in the cushy leaves with the warm lamp and the familiar sounds of siblings, food and water. What an exciting night it was for me! I felt badly the boys were sleeping through it but knew we had plenty more to be born the next day.
By Tuesday, we still had babies hatching but things had slowed down. 
On Tuesday, the chickie due date, to break the tension, and also because they were in town, my cousin and her daughter joined us to bounce out some stress at Bouncin' Bears and then out to eat for Tex-Mex. It was such an enjoyable day and a nice break in the tension of animal husbandry for us all.
Altogether, we got 27 hatchlings but not all was perfect. The first crack in the shell is called a pip. There was one egg in particular we had noticed had a pip on Sunday but by Tuesday still had not hatched. We could hear and see the egg rocking and the little beak showing just through a break of the pip so I knew he was alive...finally, when that one was born, we named him "Slow Poke". The others seems to hatch more quickly once we saw a pip. Tuesday night, maybe it was Monday, there was a sad hatchling that actually took the wind out of my sails and made my tummy sink with sadness. It was born with most of its internal organs in a sac on the outside. I knew that we could not take him to a surgeon (like who would you go to?) and I even considered trying to push things back in myself but feared I would hurt the poor thing. Martin and I talked it over and as I had observed, the poor thing had not been able to even amble to take water or food and I thought about helping it eat/drink but still just knew, it could not survive. Martin and I made the decision to decapitate it quickly. I offered to do it since this project was by no means Martin's responsibility and I knew there could be complications with these little births. Man though, it was tough thinking it over. We were making a decision a farmer makes often and even daily. We knew he would likely suffer and die.
Although all were heartbreaking, here is our most devastating birth defect chickie. So sad it left a hollow pit in my tummy when I first saw him.
In fact, there were more casualties. There were five in all. There were two more birth defects with one again, we put out of his misery and the next, even though he was not as desperately deformed, he still had intestine or cloaca or something external by about 1/2", so we made him a close but separate area with food and water and by morning, he had died. The fourth casualty was from a broken leg. I am not sure if I was not careful enough in my supervision of the children (yes, plenty of guilt feelings ensued) with the chicks or if it happened with his flock mates or what but again, we helped to separate him/her and hoped for the best. We had to separate them to protect them from the lively pecking other chicks. Anyway, he died. Then finally, a seemingly physically perky one was deceased just surprisingly on Wednesday or Thursday afternoon..I am not sure what day, but it was born no later than Tuesday and seemed just fine. I guess you never know.
The children and the chicks dying was no big deal really. Maybe they reacted a little too casually actually. Seems they understand that some things live and some things die. They were delighted to hold and cuddle and talk to the chicks. We cleaned plenty of chicken baby poo and tinkle from the carpet. It was chlorophyll green. I regret that we did not let them run outside too much but I was concerned of injury or loss...22 babies plus my three running loose....not an easy management in the tall grass. They would have enjoyed the sunshine and bugs though. I knew that Marilyn would come on Thursday, Friday or Saturday. She came on Thursday and we talked about the deformities. She suspected we did not turn them enough...again, guilt...I did the best I could at managing the hand turning but know that next time, (yes, I want to do it again sometime...maybe ducklings?) we must aim higher for 3 to 4 times per day. The boys always helped and this lesson was wonderful in many ways..more ways than they know now. Patience, responsibility, fine motor skills, accuracy, exactitude (make sure you put the lid back on the incubator straight to keep babies warm!)...how many times did I say that last month? Many. It was fun. It was also interesting. It was sometimes tiring.
We checked out some good books from our library linked here on amazon. This is not my extensive good books on chickens list (I do not have one) but rather what I could find at the library quickly as we already had the chicks incubating.
for the very young, color paper collage illustrations and not too heavy on much, a good introduction
funny story of a hen looking for a good spot to lay her egg and find good worms to eat with color photos
my favorite one we found with live photos of eggs at different stages of fertilization and growth with egg shell and membrane removed so you can really see it as well as x-ray photos of skeletal forms and details on reproduction...our first real lesson in how babies are made that I discussed with the 7 year old
another one done in watercolors skipping the full on reproduction part but still showing how an egg forms in the ovary, etc. I bought this one as I am a sucker for books soulemama recommends but that I cannot find at my local library.
It has been two and a half weeks on Thursday since they went to live with Miss Marilyn in their new small chicken coop. We visited our babies just yesterday and the boys found "James", "Tom" and "Pearl" in the small crowd. 
We were very surprised that our first chicks born on Sunday, had stiff feathers appearing in their wings by Tuesday..they grow very fast so we expected changes in them. By November, if the weather is not too cold, the hens will begin laying. I wish we could track our chicks somehow but they will get mixed in with the older flock and they will change so much in time. It would be fun to know that we are eating "James" eggs and "he" is a girl! 
We are thankful for the time we had and I hope to do a project like this again in a couple of years for the younger ones. So much fun it was for sure!
(pics are blurry, phone pics)
We were very surprised that our first chicks born on Sunday, had stiff feathers appearing in their wings by Tuesday..they grow very fast so we expected changes in them. By November, if the weather is not too cold, the hens will begin laying. I wish we could track our chicks somehow but they will get mixed in with the older flock and they will change so much in time. It would be fun to know that we are eating "James" eggs and "he" is a girl! We are thankful for the time we had and I hope to do a project like this again in a couple of years for the younger ones. So much fun it was for sure!
(pics are blurry, phone pics)If you do get a chance, please watch "The Natural History of the Chicken" on Netflix. There is a beautiful and heroic story about a mama hen that would make you want someone to call you "chicken" anytime.
Here is a video clip of a live hatch! The children are calling like a mama hens to the chicks to encourage them out as the books told us that mama's do. (I know, they don't sound like chickens but they had a way they thought it should be so we went with it!) The pencil lines you see on the eggs are to mark one side so we could keep track of making a full turn of the egg each time we rotated them. Did you know, if you wet an egg to wash it with soap to remove poop/dirt, it permeates and would harm the embryo? So if you see chicken poop on the eggs, that is why. They were au naturel. Lots of hand washing went on but not what you think. We needed clean hands so not to give the embryos a virus.
I apologize, the video is not well lit and the chick had black feathers so it may be tough to see well. You will just have to do this project yourself to really appreciate it anyway! I hope it works!
