Our Expanding Family

What started as fish has now spread to chickens!  I had to introduce you to our newest members of the family; 3 delightful Poule Rousse chickens that the kids insist on calling Sadie, Reese, and Zoe after their friends from home.  Ha!  :)

Marc and I have bounced the idea of owning chickens for several years now.  We, of course, love our pastured eggs and what's better than FRESH, pastured eggs!  Yum!  It just so happened that our set-up here was perfect for including chickens and once the girls got to play with their friend Chloe's chickens, well, let's just say the pressure was on.

So after several weeks of research by Marc (as most of you know, nothing is included in the Detraz family without tireless research by Marc first) he ordered the coop and all the supplies.  We decided to try and time it with Teah's birthday.  Everything arrived the weekend before her birthday and between bouts of rain Marc put together the coop and got everything set-up.

The day before Teah's birthday the girls got out of school at 11:30.  After lunch at Mamie and Papi's house, we drove about 30 minutes into the mountains to buy our chickens.  We were lucky to find a chicken farm not too far away that actually raised their chickens completely organic and free-range.

One side of the chicken farm

Teah excitedly waiting for her birthday chicken.

Some chickens coming to visit us while we were waiting.

We did everything we could to make their transition to their new home smooth.  Apparently, you don't want your chickens stressed or else they won't produce eggs.  We educated ourselves on the essentials of raising chickens (aka YouTube) and followed the rules by keeping them in their coop the first couple days so they would know it's their home.  And keeping the girls away from them because of course all they wanted to do was hold and snuggle them.

So excited!  All they want to do is get in there with them.

The chickens exploring their new home.

At night-fall, 2 of the chickens went right into the house, but the 3rd did not.  After we put the girls to bed we went straight to the experts (YouTube again) to find out how we were supposed to get the chicken to go into it's house.  You can picture Marc and I out there in the dark, gently trying to coax the chicken up into it's house; me with the light and Marc in the coop trying to guide it.  We finally got her in and closed the door.

The next morning we went out to let them out of their house and we had our first egg!!

Of course Marc named it our 400 Euro egg! 

The chickens proceeded to give us 2 more during the course of the day and another 3 the next day!! Woo hoo!!  Not only were we excited about the eggs but of course Marc and I had to pat ourselves on the back for feeling like bad-ass chicken raisers who managed to have happy, stress-free chickens right out of the gate.  Ha!

The 2nd day we let the chickens explore the yard and surrounding field.  Happy free-range chickens!

Of course, Teah can't resist grabbing one.  The chicken proceeded to fart on her as soon as Teah picked her up; thus the look on Teah's face.

I'm sure this is just the beginning of our chicken adventures but so far we're off to a good start!