life on a wanna-be farm

Ok, well I know it's been a little while since I blogged(like over a month!), but I really am super busy! We arrived in North Carolina January 31st, spend the night at a friend's house and then headed over to our new house on February 1st! Oh the excitement and joy! :)

We absolutely love our new house and the 5 acres that it sits on. I know a lot of our family and friends were worried about us buying this place sight unseen, but we really felt God's hand in this, and now we are completely certain of it! This is the perfect place for us! We are out in the middle of no where, and loving it!

Since moving in, we've started a TON of projects, and even completed a few of them! The boxes still aren't completely unpacked, but the important stuff is, and the house is functional. We have more important things to do anyway, like homeschool, get our garden going, and raise some animals! I'm going to try to slowly add in posts and pics of all of our projects, but today I'm going to talk about what we got in the mail this morning!

Have you ever received a call from the post office? How about a call from the post office at 6:45 in the morning? We did this morning, it was to tell us that our baby chicks were waiting for us! I have never seen my kids move so fast! We arrived at the post office at 7:10, and it's a 15 minute drive, so you do that math on how long it took 6 kids to get into the car to pick up baby chicks! :)

We decided to order our chicks for a number of reasons. The first being that we really wanted to go with a heritage breed chicken called Delawares. The second is that there is supposed to be less cross contamination of germs from other animals when you order from a hatchery as opposed to a feed or pet store. The only downside in my opinion is that shipping them is hard on them. Really though, where are the feed and pet stores getting their chicks? Chances are they were shipped too.

So we ordered 25 chicks straight run, which means you have no idea if they are boys or girls. We're hoping to end up with at least 12 laying hens, so hopefully 25 chicks will get us those 12. The roosters will be meat chickens, all except the nicest one who we will keep(much to my neighbors' dismay) so that we can have more baby chicks!

When you order baby chicks they stick in what they call an extra, just in case you have a fatality. Unfortunately we did. We did lost 1 chick, so that puts us at the 25 that we ordered. It was sadder than we expected. The poor little baby chick will get a cute little funeral this afternoon. Not sure why it's so sad since we will most likely be eating some of these chicks later on, but it still is!

This is a pic of the box the baby chicks come in. There are 26 little chicks crammed in there, it's a tiny box, b/c they need each other's body warmth to make the trip!

Now on to the fun! They are so stinkin' adorable! Little yellow fluff balls hopping around and chirping! They are inside for now, in a giant cardboard box with a heat lamp. The kids are so excited and love to listen to them chirp and watch them hop around. They all took to food and water right away, so I'm hopeful that they will all make it!

This is a pic of our 25 chicks that made it in their new temporary home! They are currently happily chirping and hopping around! :)