Guess what the girls and I found today? Guess! Oh, you know what it was: we found our first egg!
(Really, though, if you didn't figure it out from the post title you should do some inner searching.)
We almost missed the egg today. We haven't finished the laying boxes yet, so I bought some small dish bins and set them up in the coop with pine shavings and golf balls to give the chickens a little hint as to where to lay their eggs.
I set everything up and I stressed out about leaving town because I thought for sure it would happen while I was away! I would have been so disappointed. The girls would have cried.
But the eggs didn't come while we were gone, so we carried on as usual. We've been checking every day for weeks, since the hens are now of laying age, and so as we performed today's egg check we weren't surprised to find the bins empty once again. We gave the hens some grass and the girls started running back to the house while I closed up the coop. I peeked beneath the coop, as I always do, and almost didn't register the perfect little brown egg sitting happily on the ground.
"Wait, girls!" I yelled. "There's an egg!!!"
Sky and Harp stopped dead in their tracks and flipped around with the cutest, happiest looks on their little faces. They rushed back to the coop and we all walked in to gather our first egg.
Harper said, "The special egg!"
Sky said, "I can't believe it! A real, live egg!"
We don't know which chicken laid this little egg. My friend Emily told me bright red combs mean laying hens, so we've narrowed the possibilities to either Stella, Lacey or Pearl.
It's been five months since we brought home our tiny chicks and gave them funny names. Lots of cleaning, petting, feeding, watering, building, chasing and hopeful egg-checking. To put it plainly, today was a very exciting day for us! Eggciting, even! We're eggstatic! Okay, that's enough.
