Our New Ladies

This is Skittles. He is one of the original 4 babies that we got this summer. I wrote a post about them here. I had planned on updating on their growth weekly, but Buffy and Twinkie died really early on :( so I lost the motivation to follow through with that. Notice how I said "he" up there ^^^. We were told that all of our new babies were girls, and until a few weeks ago we were holding onto the chance that Skittles was a girl, although we noticed all along how aggressive he was and how quickly he was growing. Then he started crowing about a month ago. That answered that question! Haha. So we are trying to find him a new home.

Since we didn't want to leave Chewie all alone (just realized I don't have a picture of her), we bought a few more hens off Craigslist recently. They are already laying, so the hard part is done already. The yellow one is Sunny, the red one is Velma, and Roxy is the big black one. They are beautiful and we know for sure Sunny is already laying. One of the others might be laying already, too, but we haven't seen it happen. They still aren't totally accustomed to their new home, so it might take them a little longer to start laying due to the stress and major life change. Ha. Anyway, we have already enjoyed some fresh eggs and are excited to collect enough to feed us all the time. Right now we are still eating store bought in addition to the 1-2 eggs we get each day.  

en la casa

Here are a few pics that I'm finally getting around to looking at! Some from my phone some from the camera, but all around the house. We are getting more and more settled in every day, and it is absolutely our safe place. We love it so far and can't wait to make it more of a home every day. 

The boys and I left Daddy at home and are at the beach with my family until Thursday (hence the 

reason I am actually able to post.) There are LOTS of pics from this trip that Iill share soon :) 

P.S. The little chick that's in these pics (Twinkie) passed away last week followed by Buffy a couple days later :( We were surprised and devastated to say the least. Chewie and Skittles are still doing well, but we are thinking that Skittles may be a rooster!! If that's the case we may have to give him away once he starts to cock-a-doodle-DOO. That being said, I think we are going to get a couple more babies to round out the bunch and constantly triple check on them. We aren't sure what happened to our baby girls but we are going to do everything we can to make sure it doesn't happen again. I posted about the girls' first week here with the intention of updating weekly, but then life happened and I got sidetracked and then death happened, to put it lightly... 

Our Backyard Flock: Week One

Introducing the newest additions to the Escalante Clan.

• Skittles McNugget (Plymouth Barred Rock)
• Twinkie Doodle (Silkie)
• Chew-bock-a "Chewie" (Silkie)
• Buffy (The Egg Layer) (Australorp) 

Owning chickens has been on our things-we-definitely-plan-to-do list for as long as we've been talking about our future together, so we knew we'd end up with a little backyard flock, we just didn't know when. My family had chickens back when I was in high school and continued to have them after I left the nest (pun intended), so I knew that they made great little pets. We were expecting to wait a while until we got everything a little more settled with our new house, but I got a little impatient, as is my custom, and we went ahead and took the plunge.

Even though we had been talking about getting chickens for a while, the way we went about it was completely spontaneous. As I was scouring Pinterest for landscaping and gardening inspiration a few nights ago, I decided to just sketch up what I had in mind for our own back yard and started thinking about where the chicken coop would end up. That led to me searching Craigslist for baby chicks just to see if there were any in the area, which led to me finding a hatchery 10 minutes down the road, which then led to me telling Fico that I wanted to go "look" at some the next morning, which led to us actually going to "look" and leaving with four wittle chicks. Haha. So between the thought of getting chickens and actually getting them, I don't even think we let 18 hours pass. That's just the way I roll. I'm a little premature when it comes to deciding if timing is right or not. We didn't even have food, containers, pine shavings, or any form of heat for these little ladies ready for them. But we made it work and now they are full, warm and happy.

When we got them a couple days ago, they were 4 and 5 days old already, so they are a week old now and I am planning on taking a pic of each of them every week for the next few months since they grow SO fast and change so much in such a short period of time.

We couldn't be happier with these sweet girls -- at least we were told they were all girls, crossing our fingers -- and the four of us are already bonding with them well. I can't wait to see Anders and Casen grow up with them. Casen has taken on such a nurturing big brother role already. It's sweet to watch. All Anders does right now is get really excited and shout at them. Haha. He will learn in due time.