Celebrating Success!

Hello, tender friends!

We peered into the chicken coop.

Cub shouted, “Hooray!”

Anthony and I picked him up and twirled him around. “We did it!” I said to Anthony.

I’ll never forget that family moment we had when we realized two of our chickens laid their first eggs!

(Sorry about the pictures being so pixelated…it’s currently 96 degrees and we only took two pictures…the two you see here. I’m not sure why they’re not clearer).

Of course, it is only fitting that our little Cub ate the first two chicken eggs. Anthony fried them up in butter, and Cub sat down and ate the whole thing and said, “That was delicious! Thank you, Daddy!”

Anthony laughed and said, “Well, we spent $1,300 on lumber and $300 on chicken feed so far, so I hope he enjoyed those $800 eggs.” For the past 2 weeks, every time a chicken has laid an egg, we’ve joked about how it brings down the average cost of each one.

The economics are real, but you can’t put a price on this feeling. Chickens are relatively easy livestock to begin raising, but we didn’t do a perfect job. And even though this verse is out of context, “Love covers a multitude of sins comes to mind.”

We didn’t know what we were doing when we became chicken parents. Anthony and I both fretted over our baby chicks the way we did when Cub was born, and both of us woke up in the middle of the night to check on them.

I read a book about raising chickens as we were going through the process of raising them. When I got to the part of the book that told me that chickens need a 1:3 ratio of water dispensers to chickens, I called Anthony at work and blurted out, “We need to buy two more water dispensers for our chickens! The less dominant chickens could be in there dying of thirst!”

One particularly traumatizing day, Anthony and I both thought their feed was full and wondered why they weren’t eating much, and discovered after almost 24 hours of not eating that the feed was stuck because the dispenser got caught. The poor chickens were starving and clucking loudly, begging to be let out so they could forage to feed themselves.

But God’s Grace has been with us throughout this whole experience. The fact that they have started laying a little bit early means that they were having all of their needs met despite our shortcomings.

Having our own protein source in the form of eggs makes us feel jubilant. Complete self-sufficiency difficult to achieve, and most people don’t realize how expensive homesteading is. The economic irony of spending tremendous amounts of time performing labor for a tiny monetary value is real.

BUT!

The joy of sharing your first meal with your family that contains adequate protein and vegetables from your own land is beyond the standard rules of economics. The first full meal we shared as a family, with as much from our own land as possible, was eggs and okra and my squash and pepper and onion mix. I call this meal “Homegrown Keto!” (While this post isn’t about being keto, all those ingredients are, in case you were wondering).

(I also brought the squash dish to bible study last week, and the girls loved it!)

Hopefully we will one day be able to churn our own butter, so that the only outside ingredient we will need is salt and pepper and minced garlic!

Until then, we will be reveling in what we consider our success thus far.

Thank you, Jesus, that love covers a multitude of sins, including our chicken ignorance.

Ok, thank you for stopping by today, tender friends! I’ll be sharing a writing life post on Monday about my writing bag and preferred notebooks, and how they are part of my bliss!

Please click here to return to the homepage.