Hi gang!  Sorry for the delay in blogging, but I was on vacation, and you know how security experts scream about mentioning that you're going on vacation online.

We went out of town for 3 days, which meant we needed a chicken sitter.  Yeah, tried to find one of those lately?  You can always find somebody to watch the dog, and as long as the litter box is clean & there's tons of food and water, cats will be ok for a few days.  Not chickens.  Luckily one of the neighbor kids moved off a farm a year or so ago and they raised chickens.  Score!  I checked with his mom, and then Logan E became our official chicken sitter.

Getting ready for vacation means more work when you have chickens.  I didn't want the neighbor kid to have to deal with chicken droppings, so I mucked out the coop before we left.  I also scrubbed out all the feeders and the water jug.  We had orientation sessions and my mother in law sat in, in case he had questions or she needed to do something sometimes.  The feed bin was full, I refilled the little bucket of grit in the coop and told my chickie babies that I would miss them.

Oh boy, did I ever miss them.  When I'm grumpy at home, I go see the chickens and after a loooong drive and a crappy attempt at sleep in a hotel bed, I wanted my chickens.  It was a little better the second night and we drove back the third night.  Wheee, a decent night's sleep and my chickens!  I was afraid they'd be mad, since this was the longest I'd ever been away from them (the dog goes nuts when we get home, the cats ignore me for a day or 2).  They missed me too!  I got lots of pecks and they went crazy over my blue toenails but at least I wasn't getting the silent treatment.  Logan E did a great job of taking care of them so we're set the next time we go out of town.

The only bad thing is that it's been hot lately and the coop needs mucking out again.  Yuuuuuuk.

Wait a minute...

Ok, the chickens are supposed to be my babies.  I'm the one who read up on them for years, talked Hubby into building a coop, tiled and painted said coop.  I'm the one who schlepps out to let them out in the morning and put them back in.  So how did it work out that the kids named the chickens?

The only one I got to name was the late Tweetie and honestly, what else do you call a big yellow chick (besides Big Bird, I guess)?  Right now we still have 4 unnamed Orpies because I can't tell the difference by looking at them.  I can tell the difference with one of them by sound - we have an Orp who sounds more like a goose.  Right now she's Goosey.  Granted, that's not too much of a surprise since we live by the Mississippi and there's Canada geese all over, but it's still weird and not much of a surprise to anybody who knows us. 

Take the Silkies, for example.  We have a coal black one and that's Buttercup.  Why?  I have no clue except that it was named by my 10 year old on the way home from Miss Effie's Farm, where we got the Silkies (Miss Eff and I went in on an order).  The other two are Shake and Bake.  I didn't want to call them that.  A) You don't eat Silkies and B) even if you did, there isn't enough meat on their bones to make a decent chicken nugget, let alone need Shake & Bake seasoning.  The boys came up with the name and I think my mother in law may have been in on that too so the Silkies remain Shake and Bake, although I call them Shakey and Bakey.

Then there's the one Orpie with a name.  That's Forte and Logan named it.  I'm really starting to wonder about Forte.  She may be a he.  Uh oh.  On the plus side, if she's a she, she probably wouldn't be happy with a boy's name.  If he's a he...well, that's a problem we didn't plan on.  Especially since I ordered FEMALE chickens from the farm store!  They were supposed to be 6 buff Orpie girls.  Instead, I end up with 5 buff Orpies, whatever the heck Tweetie was, and now Forte might be a boy.  Like there isn't enough testosterone in my house.

We love watermelon!