One Incubator On Order

I'm so happy that last night we were able to order our incubator. I've been keeping an eye on our local Trader's Guide paper, but nothing seemed to be coming up. So I decided was going to use some of the money I had to spend from our tax return to get an incubator for around $100 or so. But when I told Paul that I was going to spend my money on that, he said that I should just order one from family funds because it was for the whole family. So last night, I found the best looking deal through Amazon because we had an Amazon gift certificate to apply to our order and the order went in. I can't wait for it to show up, but the delivery date says from Feb. 13- Mar. 3. Quite a range! So I suppose I won't hold my breath and will be pleasantly surprised when it shows up. I guess I should receive a tracking number when it ships.

Now I have to decide what to do about chicks to hatch. I could gather eggs from our chickens, but it will take a while to get enough. I figure we are getting about 3 eggs every 2 days. You can gather eggs for 10 days to incubate-leaving them sitting on the counter, not the fridge while you are collecting them up. In 10 days, we would have about 15 eggs. I'm just debating whether I want to hatch out from our eggs, or try to get eggs from somewhere else of another breed. You can buy eggs from eBay or EggBid if you want specific breeds. I'm also toying with the idea of adding a couple more layers to our flock before then. It took our chickens about 6 months to get to laying stage. Not sure that I want to wait that long again on chicks we'd raise. It'd be good to get a couple more layers now. It's not always easy to introduce new chickens to an established flock, from what I read, though. The recommendation is to slip them in at night and when they all wake up together, they might not mind as much. That's pretty much how we do kids around here. I sneak them in overnight on Paul, and he never notices we've added another to our brood! No, really, honey, there have always been this many...

And speaking of new kids, I'm hoping both our goats are bred now. Cowboy will be mosying home next weekend, probably. Goats are pregnant for about 5 months. So fresh milk is still a ways off for us. But, Paul has agreed that we can look for a goat that is milking currently and purchase it in the mean time. We're not going to go out of our way on this one, but if we find one it would be great. We're also not going to spend a bundle on it, but some mixed dairy breed would be fine. I think he actually just likes me to keep him busy with new projects to build things for.

Right now, he's got plans going for a small chicken coop and run for meat chickens, some kind of shelter for rabbit cages, a greenhouse, and a pig pen. In addition to finishing a combo workshop and guesthouse, finishing our living room addition, and expanding the goat pen. Plus if we are able to find a milk goat, he will have to make a couple modifications to the goat barn that would have had to be made anyways. I'm just happy that he is handy at building things. He has built all our outbuildings and barns around here. Plus added a few rooms onto our home. We couldn't have done much of anything if we'd had to pay for someone to work on building all these things. If I want him to make something, I just find a picture of what I like and he goes to it. It goes a long ways towards why I keep him around!