January 28th, 2021

Last year, when we went into quarantine, my parents decided we needed chickens. When you grow your own chickens and feed them organic scraps, they lay organic eggs. My family likes organic food because the chemicals sprayed on produce, and the chemicals fed to animals can be absorbed into what we eat. Farm fresh eggs also make baked stuff like cakes, or cookies, better. 

We didn't have any chickens, but my Papa does, and so does our friend Liz. We got the eggs from her, and incubated them. It takes 21 days for the eggs to hatch so we put a date on them in pencil. One day after they were supposed to hatch, we woke up and there they were.  We put them in one of my moms plants, until they got big enough to go outside. 

The little chicks were super cute.  We hatched six eggs, and three of them were roosters. You cant tell when they are little, which sucks, because you don't know which ones are roosters until you already have a favorite. We cant have roosters because we live in the city and the crowing would bother our neighbors. We had to get rid of the three roosters. 

After the hens got bigger, we had to build a hen house. My brother had a new top for his jeep delivered. It came on a big pallet. We repurposed the pallet, added some glass from some windows that had been replaced, and made a chicken house we can see through. Its kind of like an ant farm. 
I helped build the chicken coop with my dad. 

The chickens we hatched are called Cochens. Theyre different because they have seven toes instead of three, and they have big fluffy poofs on the top of their heads. They also lay much smaller eggs. We also got four red hens. They're called Sexlink chickens. They were genetically designed to lay big eggs. Their eggs are really big. 

I'm going to try to post a video of the chickens taking a bath.  Do you think it is an invasion of privacy if I take pictures of them in the bath house?