It all started when I was a little girl. I used to scatter cat food out in the yard so my cats would gather around me and I’d pretend they were my chickens. Sounds like the beginnings of a chicken lady if you ask me. A few years ago my neighbors got chickens, then my husband wanted chickens. I said “no!”, I already had three kids, four dogs and four cats among other things to take care of. Then last year I got the bright idea to be more self sufficient, you know growing our own food and being a producer instead of a consumer. Of course the first thing you need is chickens. I checked out every book the library had on chickens. One day my next door neighbor’s daughter came over and said she was moving in with them and mentioned she didn’t know what she was going to do with her chickens. I didn’t hesitate for a second in offering to take them, but there was one problem, we needed a coop! So hubby got to work

and we all pitched in.

All of the neighbors thought we were building a deer blind. My husband hated my color choice but everyone else loved it so he lost. I’m always right when it comes to colors, when will he learn? After a couple of weeks it was time for the finishing touches

and viola! The finished product.

Now it was time to pick up our chickens. I had read the best time to move chickens was after dark so I set out with a dog carrier and a flash light. When I got there they were roosting in their hen house, happy as can be. Their current owner grabbed one and stuck her in the carrier while I closed the gate behind her. Then he wrangled hen number two and into the carrier she went. As he was trying to put number three in the carrier I heard something rustling behind me in the dark, I looked back and when I did I accidentally opened the carrier gate too far and then ALL of the chickens escaped. We went from almost three to zero in half a second. After chasing chickens around in the dark for what seemed like forever we finally corned one, loaded her up and I took her home. Before I left though we came up with a plan for the following night. Come the next morning our apparently traumatized hen wouldn’t come out. my anxious children waited not-so-patiently in their pajamas until around 1pm when she finally ventured out. We celebrated. That night our plan worked and we gathered two more hens. Then, if we weren’t already the most popular kid hang out in the neighborhood, we were now.
There was still one little hen left back at their previous house and my husband and kiddos made several attempts to catch her. The problem was she was onto us coming into her hen house and capturing chickens after dark, so she found herself another place to roost. We just had no idea where that was. Finally one night the whole family went over there, hunted her down, and my husband captured her out of her new roost in a tree. I swear it sounded exactly like she was shrieking “help! help!” With all four chickens settled into their new home there was nothing left to do but wait…..wait on the eggs.