I keep insisting that I am not a crazy chicken lady! (And yes, I am usually saying this with an exasperated emphasis) But, the inexplicable giddiness I felt yesterday as the first egg in our incubator pipped belies the truth. I in fact am a crazy chicken lady.
Oh, how I have scoffed when reading about others who sit up all night the first day their chicks are due to hatch. . .how they can’t move away from the little plexi-glass window of the incubator. . . how they whisper words of encouragement to the little peeps they here from inside the shells. Now, that looney-tune is me! I had an entire 5 gallon bucket of green beans to snap yesterday which I made dismal progress on because every time there was a peep or the sound of pecking from the incubator the kids and I were huddled around it watching, hoping, and praying that little chick would pop out!
Just one, I just needed one chick to actually hatch. After our first failed attempt at hatching out eggs in which I’m pretty certain I cooked the eggs (ewww…go ahead say it out loud). I decided to give it one more try before I gave up on hatching all together. For one week we took 4 eggs and placed them into the incubator, each day in its own row, by the end of the week we had 28 eggs of every shape size and color lined up in the egg turner.
Let me just say I would be terrible at hatching eggs if it were not for the egg turner. I could barely remember to check on them and the temperature once a day let alone if I had needed to turn them 3 times a day! We borrowed our incubator from the kids’ kindergarten teacher, but the same model is available at TSC. The incubator kept a very constant temperature and needed no adjustment once the initial temperature was achieved. Just remember to make very slight turns of the knob and wait for the temperature to adjust before walking away!
We did try candling the eggs this week. . . thank you google images for helping us decipher the varying shades inside the egg! It looks like we should have at least a few more hatch, fingers crossed.
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