The Shadow Knows. . .

that she's just hanging around, but I sure hope our elderly neighbor didn't see this! She might call animal control, lol.

I am remiss in my promise to upload photos of the pet rat that will be my son's science fair project. [He's going to attempt to train her to do tricks and make a video demo of it]

Since he has her pretty well tamed, he does let her run loose in his room frequently. Today he was outside and happened to see this image in his bedroom window:

I promise. Sweeter photos to follow. . .

Ok, today is day 14 [out of 21] and the cracked egg looks the same, so we're holding out hope for the little guy. Of course, there's the possibility it was a dud egg all along. Only time will tell. 1 more week. We have not done any more candling because of fear of more injury, but I'm considering. . . so vote in comments, should I look or not?? :)

Little Swimmer!

My dh attempted to video tape me candling eggs. Next time we won't invite the kids, lol. All the eggs we looked at had little black dots moving around!! So it was very exciting and happy. These are baby chicks on day 6 of incubation:

Cracked

Well, today was a sad day. When we turned the eggs first thing this morning, we dropped and cracked one of the eggs. I immediately put tape on it and did a google search. Funny thing is, people have successfully hatched a cracked egg!! Maybe not two weeks out. . . but still. Later, I accidentally got water on it, which was then trapped in the tape. So I took off the tape. [No more damage done thankfully.] And melted some candle wax on it; an idea I found on a chicken website. I tried to candle it to see if there even was a live baby chick inside, but these darn green/blue eggs are not candling nicely!! Not even on other days when we tried candling.

Here's our egg: Hoping it can last!! Not sure if I want to do any more candling and risk handling the eggs. . . Maybe in a few days. . . For now, I'm just going to leave this one alone [other than turning] and pray for the best:

"Candling Eggs"

YAY! We attempted our first candling this evening and were super spastic excited!

Candling is when you shine a bright light through the egg so you can see what's going on inside. Kind of like 'ultrasound' for chicks. We used a bright desk lamp with a movable neck and I made a cardboard table with a small cutout for the light to shine on the egg. This way, we were able to set the egg down on the 'holder' and take pictures!. We only candled three eggs tonight and all of them looked good! It is normal to loose a bunch- especially first timers like us, so the fact that we randomly picked three good ones out of 18 seems like a great sign to us!

Here's one, but I bet my husband's photos were better. I'll try to get them up too.

The spidery veins and dark spot is the developing chicken:

Let the Incubation Begin-

So, I have avoided posting until I really had something cool to share, lol. Well, happily, now I do and not a day too soon: For my 2 Second Graders, I decided they could incubate some chicken eggs for the annual homeschool science fair. On one of our local lists is a homeschool mom that RENTS the incubators AND the eggs. Once you are done- you can give them back. It's a really cool idea as it just makes its seem so much more assessable. I picked up the eggs, incubator, chick food and water [for after hatching] and the instructions. It's a simple styrofoam electric incubator w/ no turner. We set it up and left it overnight [I moved it a couple of times] and next morning added the eggs. Since we'll be turning the eggs, we marked them with Xs and Os on opposite sides to keep track of their rotation. Saturday we will start 'candling' with a bright lamp covered w/ cardboard. . . The incubation process takes about 21 days. . . and I'll keep you 'posted' right here!

We have eggs from at least 3 different types of chickens:

Here Cordell is marking the Xs and Os as we add them to the incubator. Melodie did some too.

Next, I'll try to post photos of turning the eggs and candling. . . stay tuned!

Ready, Set, Go. . . Umm, not quite

I love taking 'vacation' from 'homeschool!' I'm not so good about getting back into it. Thus my kids are not so good at it either. I had planned to have the first 2 weeks in January be 'half-time' weeks to ease into it. Well, it's turning out to be more like 1/32nds or something. We are all recovering from days and days of staying up all night and recuperating from sinus infections. [I don't know why, but we love to stay up all night- despite the disadvantages] We still have a few 'special events' during this time too. I always celebrate my birthday [1/5] usually extending it the entire week if I can manage to. [out w/ my older girls, out w/ the youngest kids, out w/ my girlfriends, out w. my dh. . . you get the idea] So that's a distraction. And Next Week my oldest leaves for Navy Bootcamp. [boo. :(] So lots of distractions there too. I really want to get back into the normal routine, but not if it's just going to be disrupted again!. We did do Latin w/ our friends on Monday and maybe we'll tackle a few things Thursday and Friday. Next week, I hope to to do at least as much. Happy New Year!