Here Chick, Chick, Chick!!!!!!

Okay, so I'm from the BIG city, Houston born and raised (or "raised up" as they say in the Panhandle).  Then it was off to Austin to attend and graduate from the University of Texas.  I lived in Austin my entire adult life so moving to Pampa was a little change of pace - to say the least.  I'm loving it though and David and I are getting to enjoy some country ways in the middle of the town.  One of the things we wanted to do was raise some chickens.  My family had a few chickens when I was little but I don't really remember it.  My older sister remembers that she used to step in the little blobs of chicken poop and it would ooze through her toes.  I have no such memories!  Anyway, sometime the first part of June, we dragged out some of the old wood that Daivd had stored away in the backyard and we proceeded to build the coop. 

So, the work began on the amazing Five Star residence for our chickens!!  The completed Four Seasons chicken hotel will be revealed in a later blog.

The coop was finished and attached to the dog run in the backyard.  On the first official day of "Popoo and Gigi Camp", my oldest granddaughters, Hayden and Campbell, David's granddaughter, Emily, David and I piled into the car, drove through McDonald's and headed out to the far reaches of northern Amarillo in search of a chicken owner's farm David found on Craig's List.  The seller told David that he had some pure breeds and some cross breeds available.  The picture on Craig's List showed the chickens in a pen and they all looked so cute.  Funny how pictures can be deceiving!!!

Yes, this is a picture of the chicken pen.....the wide open spaces.  The chicken seller must have put the chickens in the turkey pen to take the picture and then released them out into their wild environment.  I will say that the next 30 minutes was like something from a "Ma and Pa Kettle" movie.  Oh my gosh, there must have been three hundred chickens running around, a mixed breed lab/pitbull dog barking ready to kill anything in his path and a bunch of turkeys gobbling in the background.  The dog was held back by a flimsy fence and our 2 dogs immediately jumped out of the car and were ready to kill all the chickens and the pit bull.  Visions of having to report death by dog bites and chicken pecking to the grandchildren's parents passed across my brain.  While I held back our weimaraner from sure death, the 7 pound maltese, Shelby, set about convincing the pit bull she was going to kill him.   My very life passed before my eyes.  After we calmed everyone down, David and the owner proceeded to capture the chickens we wanted with a fishing net.....yes folks, I said a fishing net.  We went from wanting certain kinds of chickens to just being happy that some were caught and dumped unceremoniously into our, not so big, dog carrier.  The girls were having a blast totally unaware of the chaos surrounding them.  Emily has chickens so she was great at catching the little babies for all of them to hold. 

Campbell

Emily

Hayden

There is more to the adventures of the chicken capture but that is for another day's story.  One last thing, this girls were convinced that we needed to take one of the baby chicks home since it only had one eye left.........See y'all later!!!