Learning about Critter care, and the Monster egg.

 Today is another day pre arrival of the Critter, and we've settled into the routine of being on alert and are trying to just keep ready to go without stressing out. It has actually given us some time to have a lot of good experiences, learn a lot, and for the Lady of the House and I to read a lot about the impending Critter care. For instance we went to the Cloth Diaper Swap & Shop put on by the Simple Diaper & Linen service  which ironically has a longer title than URL. The beautiful pallet arbor bench Above is from the art space near the swap and shop.

We for a very reasonable price managed to get enough more cloth diapers to have a sufficient stock rather than a just barely feasible stock. We also got to observe the Cloth Diapering 101 class which was very comforting and gave us a lot of ideas about what we needed to know that were accentuated and helped by advice from friends who have cloth diapered. We are now a lot more confident in what we're doing, and while that may be an illusion, we'll take it, delusion can be very useful.


So, as promised the Monster Egg. First things first, let's have a size comparison. Left you can clearly see the difference between it and the standard sized egg. It's not quite Turkey egg sized, but it is significantly larger. I also imagine it involved a very surprised chicken. I have to be honest I don't know how this sort of thing happens, but it is kind of fun to see. I found a little blog post that explains how the double yolk happens here. Essentially it's two eggs released into the oviduct at the same time. So as we promised Below Left you can see the inside of the egg that we hard boiled. It was a strange sort of double yolk.  The thing that was interesting to me was that instead of two distinct yolks it was two that are sort of tied together looking. All in all, it's an egg, and we're glad to have a good big egg from a healthy girl. The main concern with larger eggs of course is a higher chance of egg binding or similar problems that can be fatal to the chicken or at the very least cause problems. We approach this having come from having pet birds, and seeing a Cockatiel dead on the floor of her cage from egg binding was sad and unfortunate and obviously we'd like to avoid that. So how does one avoid that? The primary method is to make sure that chickens are well fed and have sufficient calcium. This link has a good read on information about egg binding and how to avoid or treat it. Well worth having on reference if you have chickens, or birds at all.

Otherwise we've been continuing slowly accumulating wood to make sure we're going to be ok for the winter, and preparing for winter over all. But before then, we have rain. Lots of rain expected over the next few days. To try to reduce the damage to the driveway we have put some old hay in the areas that are most likely to wash out to try to reduce the flow speed. We'll see how that goes. Before snow is on the ground though we want to clear all of that off, and all of the leaf litter to reduce the layer of slippery below the snow and ice. It sounds stupid, but if you hit ground below snow you want it to be nice and grippy.

That reminds me, I need to service the snow blower.

So that's it for today, we may have the critter soon, we may not. Either way, life goes on and we just keep getting done what we can.