Piney Woods Homeschool

This has been a wild month!  First we had a hen, unexpectedly, and then we had two hens, also unexpectedly.  Then we had a hen and a rooster, and then we just had a rooster.  It seemed unkind, and also useless, to keep the rooster by himself, so we’ve been looking for a couple of hens.  Hens are hard to come by these days, though.  The only place we could find that had hens, rather than just very young chicks, was about an hour away.  As it happens, Papaw found them not long after we did.  He agreed to pick up the hens from the poultry farm and deliver them to our house on Thursday evening, so once again we acquired new birds unexpectedly (since all this was worked out during the day Thursday).  DH called the farmer and placed his order for what we wanted.  The man only had two laying hens for sale at all, but he had lots of younger hens to choose from. Papaw arrived with five birds in a large dog carrier:  two young h...

The kids are crushed.  Natasha died early this afternoon.  Since we got her, she’s had a couple of spells where she seemed quite ill, but she’d always recovered.  This afternoon it seemed clear she was not going to get over it this time.  We’re not sure exactly what was wrong, but we think she might have had complications from some injuries she received when a dog attacked her awhile ago, before she came to live with us. We can’t leave Alexander by himself, so we need to get a couple of hens now.  Hopefully that won’t turn out to be a difficult project, and hopefully we’ll be able to introduce the hens without a lot of conflict.