More Chicks...

Living on a farm is a life-style.  Really, because vocation and career don't quite cover it.  It isn't just the farmer that works on the farm, the entire family does.

Case-in-point:  I was in the middle of putting kids to bed, and I hear, "Angela! Come Quick! the Chicks are dying!" Gee...I just bought them earlier that day, this is last thing I need since the kids are already late going to bed. (These are cornish-crosses. They are a meat bird, not egg like our other 150. Yes, that means we have like 250 birds. These boys will be free-range broilers in about 5 months.)

They were dying. Did you know that if  a chick gets wet it's like instant hypothermia?  The waterer malfunctioned and got the floor wet, and then chicks laid down in it.  Michael is frantically pulling them out, and trying to sho the others away.   I grabbed a few and ran them inside, and dumped them where? Well, on the kitchen table.  I was thinking, "they need to be warm and dry....towel in the dryer...blow dryer!"

Oddly, I have 2 blow dryers.  Landen and I started blowing them dry.  Micheal kept bringing them in. There was about 45 total that got wet (out of 100).  It took about an hour, but we were able to save most of them.   So, what did my kids do?  Well, Maggie terrorized the house while she was getting ignored (and loved every second of it!) and Landen held a blow dryer.  It was good, because he was a little upset.   Two Day Old chick look like grasshoppers wet.  It's sad.  But they fluffed up.  I mean, I was really surprised we didn't lose more. Some of the chicks were hardly breathing when they came in.

 We kept them inside most of the rest of the night. With a heater blowing on them and some molasses in their water (good for stress).  We stuck them back out with the rest in a new box before we went to bed.  Michael installed another light to keep them toasty.  And we got a new waterer, which we made sure worked properly!

I pretty much poured bleach on my table afterward.  (our table is formica, but let's not talk about the weird 7/8 of a circle built in formica table with oak swivel chairs...)  The kids did eventually go to bed, almost 2 hours late, and they did not sleep in.

 Sometimes, it's more important to save chicks than to go to bed on time.