Yesterday I worked all day. Ady was home in the morning, Dad was here in the afternoon. I think they all spent most of their time in the garden.
Today I slept in having had a very bad disturbed nights’ sleep. When I got up at 10am one of the eggs was looking like this:
A second one was pipping and a third had definite movement going on.
We spent the remainder of the morning frantically checking the eggs and urging on the frontrunner (who already had at last seven names – ‘Hatch’ ‘Puff’ ‘Buddy’ ‘Firsty’ you get the picture…) before finally deciding at 130pm when we were already supposed to be at Ali’s that the chick had no intention of working to our schedule so we’d be better off going out and leaving it to it’s hatching business.
We had a very nice couple of hours with Ali and Freya, and Eira with her two from our EOFF set. We went for a walk across the downs which was utterly lovely :). The children picked up chalk (which is one of the few things (along with dogs, terrcotta or other unglazed pottery and chipped nail varnish) that I have issues with and did lots of drawing along the way on the paths.
including most hilariously arrows to each individual lump of horse manure across a bridge with ‘poo’ written by some of the writers in the group 😆
We saw white horses which ate from the childrens’ hands whilst still retaining that air of intrigue and ‘I could be a unicorn you know’ type mystique that white horses have (or is that just me?)
There were loads of rabbits about and we also saw more horses and then walked through the allotments which end with a patch of land where someone keeps chickens, goats and (I’m sure a fairly recent addition) racing pigeons. We talked a bit about them and homing instincts (Davies mentioned cats have something similar). We paused for a bit at a ruined concrete block building. Davies was slightly fanciful in proclaiming ‘600 million years ago this used to be a castle…’ I’m guessing that it was more like 30 years ago it used to be a shed. We moved on rather rapidly when one of the children picked up a lump of asbestos and started trying to smash it up admid cautionary tales of asbestosis from me (which I don’t think any of the children not related to me believed :lol:).
We paused again by a tree and bank that the children all spent some time clambering on and took a bit of persuading down from. While we waited for them all to come down some of them went ahead into a railway tunnel to have fun with echoes. When they had gone quiet I went to investigate and found they had uncovered various pieces of a decorative tile and were pieceing them back together again:
We arrived back at Ali’s and the children particpated in Freya’s treasure hunt activity which went down very well (and had Ali and I goggling at L’s superior reading skills 😯 bless her) and then it was time to head for home.
Where we discovered the egg had finally fully hatched and here was the first (and possibly only although I’m still hoping for more) chick 🙂
Much smaller than the chicken chicks that we hatched last year. I knew they would be of course, given both the egg size and the eventual full grown size but those chicks looked tiny so these are minute! Very cute already having little fluffy feet and already super fiesty and loud (clearly another rooster :lol:).
Hopefully tomorrow will bring more new additions.
pmsl at the bridge