These first four pictures were taken in July, when Jeff had just cut the holes in the nesting boxes. I love the shapes he cut. Then he added knobs, hinges, and latches to create little doors so we could gather the eggs each day from our yard without having to walk inside the chicken coop to get them.

 The rest of these pictures are from a few weeks ago. 

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I’ve been wanting to show our daily ritual, checking for eggs. It’s a highlight of our day. Sometimes Bracken is accompanied by mom to the chicken coop and sometimes by dad. If you say “want to go check for eggs?”, you can count on an enthusiastic “yes” from a little boy. When we walk in the garden, Bracken heads over to the coop and says “blue ladder!” He carefully climbs up the blue ladder while we’re with him. He usually needs a little help getting the latches open. Then he checks inside each nesting box to see if there is a surprise waiting for him. I wrote before about our excitement over finding the first egg and how Bracken had been checking the nesting boxes regularly for quite awhile before that first egg came. Most days we find a single little pullet egg from our chicken, Honey. We get used to that one egg a day, but here and there we’ll have a day with no egg. Honey is a Golden Sex Link and from what I hear, they lay earlier than other breeds.

 We got a ceramic egg for $2 from the feed store. Honey seemed to lay her eggs where the ceramic egg was. The other day we moved the ceramic egg to the middle nesting box as an experiment and she layed her egg there. We had wondered if she preferred a certain nesting box or if she liked to lay her egg where the ceramic egg was.

 Honey sure does lay some adorable little eggs. It’s an exciting thing- this daily egg. Every time we add Honey’s eggs to our scrambled eggs, Bracken gets so delighted.

 Here is Honey, the shining beauty. (Originally her name was Sunshine, but Honey really suited her better.)

 Behind her is Bear.

The other day something exciting happened. We visited the nesting boxes to find not one, but two eggs. In one nesting box was Honey’s little brown egg and in another was a large light-colored egg that looked like it came from Americauna. The next day we found our usual single egg. 

But our one-egg-a-day routine is about to change…