Good Rainy Wednesday!

After working the last two days at my real job (read that: paying job), I am home for the whole day today. This is a good thing because I can find all sorts of things to do to be useful around here. Already completed is today's laundry and dishes, our teenagers were driven to school, some groceries shopped for, stamps bought and invitations for the upcoming 8th Grade Graduation BBQ have been written, addressed, and sent. Breakfast was yummy; 2 egg omelet with sharp cheddar cheese and 3 perfectly crisped slices of bacon with a glass of water to wash it down. Even though the skies keep threatening more rain, it is turning out to be a fairly nice day. The kind of day where you can curl up in a comfy chair with a throw over your legs and a nice book to read... once you finish all the chores, of course! I am keeping that mental picture in to forefront of my mind as an incentive to keep me on the ball.

In addition to the mundane household necessities, I have also taken the opportunity to check on the remaining duck eggs and made my 1st attempt at seeing any evidence of life in the newly incubating chicken eggs. This is Day 3 for the batch of chicken eggs, so I was kind of hoping that I might see some signs of red veining or something, but all that was visible in the 3 eggs I sampled, were the yolks floating inside of the eggs. It is either too soon to tell or the hens laying these eggs were too fast for our lads! The duck eggs seem to be progressing fine. Two of the three eggs living in the incubator are definitely alive and moving in their shells. I have not seen signs of their beaks poking through the air sac membrane, though, so that is the next milestone  and, of course, I can't yet hear them pipping inside their eggs. I wish I knew for sure which day of development we are on, so I could better anticipate the hatching day, but I can only make a guess. According to the charts I have studying as if they held the answers to a million game show question and my previous blog posts regarding when we discovered the nest, my best guess is that today is day 24. The eggs could, just as likely, be only 22 days old or as old as 26 days. So, I continue to watch and wait. I have stopped turning them, as almost all the websites suggest doing that after day 21. This is nerve wracking and exciting. I just hope the ducklings hatch and are healthy! And, if they could manage to do so today, all the better!

In a sad end of events, Momma duck outside, abandoned her nest and rejoined the rest of her flock. As upsetting as this is to us, she seems to be showing absolutely no signs of dismay. Is it strange that I feel a little jealous of a duck? I mean, here I am watching these eggs like they contained my own children inside; checking the temperature and humidity levels several times a day, worrying about maintaining the right conditions, worrying about when to stop turning them, worrying that some catastrophe could strike, worrying about handling them too much, worrying about worrying too much... and she is out splashing around in the pool without a care in the world. Just saying.

In other news, the new kids have become increasingly daring in their wanderings. Sean found them yesterday out near the dog play yard. So, I am on goat guard duty today and tomorrow until he and I can either install some low chicken fencing with its smaller gauge wires around the perimeter of the goat pasture or we can reinstall the electric fencing to dissuade their meanderings. I strongly suspect these will be about as effective a measure as they were when Rachel and Leah were small enough to fit through the fencing and that we will resort to the same remedy that we did then- feeding them up good so they are no longer small enough to fit through the fencing. It is a good thing that they are so stinking cute, still!

I have no pictures of today's activities. It is too difficult to try to photograph the candling of eggs one handed. But, I will leave you with this picture of the kids in the hay from the weekend.


I hope you all have a great day!
Sonja ♥

P.S. I have added some new features to the blog and updated it's look. I am hoping this will be as easy to read. If you hover your mouse to the right side of the page, you should now see three new items. One is a "Translation Key" for my readers from other countries. I am not sure why I might be of interest to anyone in Russia, Germany, or Malaysia but I am happy to have readers from so far away. I hope this new application is functioning and I will be toying with the format over the next few days. Secondly, I added a widget to show how many page views the blog has received each week. (That one is mostly self-serving, I admit.) The third widget is a place so that any of you readers who are so inclined can sign in as regular readers of our blog. I would love it if you would take a minute to follow the steps to sign in. It would really add to our enjoyment our writing of the Lally Broch Farm Blog, in knowing there are real live people out there reading it! ♥