Ady worked this morning while the rest of us had a lie in to recover from the weekend. Scarlett crept into my bed around 7am so my last couple of hours were more dozing interspersed with occasional Scarlett-chatter which tends to be random, fast and always requiring some level of response :roll:.
It was Ben 10 marathon day on whatever channel it is that shows Ben 10 so we dipped in and out of that and Davies and Scarlett did some drawing which moved onto painting later in the day. I was feeling irritated by the state of the house and chicken area but utterly unmotivated to do anything to deal with it. Actually I think it may well have been fabulous house and garden envy sneaking in from the two wonderful specimens we saw over the weekend really.
Ady came home just after lunchtime and spent some time playing Top Trumps with Davies then cooked a roast dinner. The children and I watched some of The Sound of Music and they carried on with their painting. I did sterling work of emptying my email inbox and sending several emails I’d been meaning to do for a while.
We all spent time outside dealing with chicken politics too. The broody bantam led her chicks out of the coop and into the run where she was teaching them how to peck and drink and stuff – a far cry from the mollycoddling they get inside the sterile brooder box in the house with heat lamp etc. on them for days. She sort of gathers them all up in her ‘skirts’ and can even walk along with them tucked up inside her feathers – it’s very impressive. The other hen has started to try and peck at them though and although she is defending them well we will need to monitor that to ensure it doesn’t get out of hand. It is perfectly normal apparently and better if they can learn for themselves to stay out of bigger hens way until they can deal a decent peck back as it means there is no need for reintegration back in at a later stage – plus I’d really rather not have a third seperate chicken area. We are still considering getting rid of the cockerel which would shake up the whole pecking order anyway and probably therefore be the right time to introduce the older chicks into the same space as the two hens and the new chicks. I don’t want to spend time or money creating some sort of super coop if we end up with all 9 chicks being roosters! I think we’ve decided to keep any hens, Spatchcock regardless of gender and one cockerel from the chicks so potentially we will have anything from 2 to 11 hens and a cockerel. Ady thinks he has a home for the mean cockerel – it’s a big shame he is so small otherwise he would be next Sunday’s dinner really.
Some more photos anyway:
Getting them all in tonight was amusing – I assume the new chicks were just too little to find their way back up the step into the coop so they were out chirping very loudly alone while the hens and cockerel had already gone in – they are also small enough to get in places they shouldn’t so we had fun trying to round them up and get them back in the coop and underneath their ‘mother’. The bigger chicks now give the total runaround when you try and put them away too so Ady and I were both out there for ages trying to get everyone to bed 🙄
Davies and Scarlett had an early bath before dinner – Davies had his hair styled just like one of the cool blokes at the Green Fair with red spikes:
It is actually thick enough to tuft up like this even when dry and probably even without hair gel 😆
Not to be outdone Scarlett had her hair blowdried straight and then whizzed around the room getting it to flip around before finally lying down so I could arrange it Medusa-like for her 😆
We had a lovely dinner, Davies and I played Top Trumps and then despite best intentions, early bath and dinner they still managed to be awake long past 9pm. Tomorrow I’ll be on ChickenWatch :).