The Not-Quite-But-Possibly-Truly-First-Egg

Today while I was stuck at home babysitting Ayden again, I decided I am at least going to have something to show for this day other than a paycheck. So when he went down for his nap (thankfully feeling much better) I bundled up and headed out to the chicken coop to build my now-egg-producing-poultry something nice to lay their eggs in. I had bought some white baskets from the dollar store about 4 months ago to use as nest boxes, but so far they'd just been stuck up on a high shelf in the chicken coop waiting for me to install them. Recently one of the black hens has taken to roosting at night way up there perched on this precarious stack of baskets. Often I have looked at those baskets and idly wondered, "Could there be an egg in there? Nah." Well today when I took it down lo and behold, there was one filthy brown egg nestled in 4 months worth of chicken droppings. Ewwww. But it still brought a smile to my face seeing something so precious that my chicken had left for me. It gave me warm fuzzies thinking about her jumping up about 8 feet to get on that shelf and then thinking that basket would be the perfect thing to lay an egg in (yea me for thinking like a chicken!) and then crawling inside that stack of baskets and laying her egg. Granted, in filth, but an egg nevertheless. I have no idea how old this egg is, and I may do the egg-in-water test to determine how old it is. What you do is pour a bowl full of cold water and gently place the egg in it. If it sinks to the bottom and stays there, it is about three to six days old. If it sinks, but floats at an angle, it's more than a week old. If it sinks, but then stands on end, it's about two weeks old. If it floats, it's too old and should be discarded. Go ahead and try that with your store bought eggs and you might never eat them again!

I was able to accomplish an unholy amount of remodeling while Ayden took his nap. I took down 3 shelves that were previously installed high on one wall of the coop, and re-purposed them as shelves to screw the nest boxes onto. Since they love to sleep in naughty places, such as up on one of the shelves in the shed-side of the coop, I went ahead and put a couple nest boxes up there. If they're gonna be pooping all over my side of the shed they can at least lay me some eggs while they're at it. I filled their nest boxes with dry leaves (which were very hard to find considering it's been raining for 2 days... devotion is me out there picking leaves one by one from the top layer of leaves strewn about my lawn). My mother suggested I make the nest boxes more tempting by putting a hard-boiled egg in it to get their little eggy motors running (note the large brown egg in the nest. That thing looks so tempting even I would like to lay an egg in it). Porcelain eggs are ideal because they cannot accidentally break the egg out of curiosity with a well placed peck and then discover its wonderful yummy contents and thus become egg eating monsters. Alas I have no porcelain eggs. I riffled through Ayden's toy box looking for last years Easter eggs and managed to find the fake plastic egg that came with his kitchenette set from 2 years ago along with a fake strawberry and a hard red ball. Chickens are not that smart... so why not?

Fake plastic egg.

Fake plastic strawberry.
;)