Busy Week

The Marine had labs and doctors appointment at Navy base this past Monday.  Of course the post office called about 30 minutes before it was time for us to leave and tell us our baby chicks had arrived.  When I ordered them my deliver date was the week of February 3rd.  I did not know they would be here on the 3rd.  Mom had spent the weekend in town so I called and asked her to rescue the chicks until I got home.

The Marine's appointments are an all day affair for us.  Labs are at 10:45 and then his doctors appointment is at 2:PM.  Since we are a little over an hours drive from the base, there is not enough time to come back home and go back.  I called daughter and asked her and SO to meet us for lunch at Red Lobster.  Lobster Fest is going on for the next 10 weeks and we had a craving for some lobster.  We had a nice leisurely lunch before we made the second appointment.  All is well with the Marine.  It was just a check-up.  We did find out that sometimes during the year the VA is opening a home health service for severely disabled vets such as the Marine.  The doctor will actually make house calls if needed and they will send nurses out to draw blood for the labs.  We can also have a nurses aide several times a week to give his bath.  I am trying not to get my hopes up too high for this as we all know the government is cutting out as much as they can from the Military.  Any disabled vet and their caregivers post 9/11 get all kinds of fringe benefits that my Marine doesn't.  It's simply not right to treat one generation of veterans differently from others. But don't get me started!

When we got back home Mom had already opened the box of chicks and gave them all a drink of water.  I put them into a temporary cage under the shed with a heat lamp.  I used to put new chicks in the sun room in a kiddie wading pool but Papa Bear gave the pool to the piggies last year when they were babies and I have not purchased another.,  Besides that the Marines Rat Terrier "Baby"  may have thought they were little rats and needed taken care of so no chicks in the house. Look at those cute little Rhode Island Reds who is going to start our new flock.  I am still trying to find a Barred Rock rooster for my 4 remaining girls that made it through the massacre.

The weekend before the Marines appointment Papa Bear and I had started building a new baby chick house/brooder.  I had an idea in mind what I wanted and we kind of made it up as we went along.  The only thing I had to buy to make the new chickie/ brooder house was a small box of roofing nails.  We already had bits and pieces of everything already here.  My new blogger friend Izzy over at The Compound calls all of the piled up stuff, resource inventory and all of this time I have been calling it JUNK.  Sometimes junk resource inventory comes in handy. Would you believe the shingles are from leftovers when we built our house almost 20 years ago.  That man (Papa Bear) doesn't throw anything away.

It has sliding doors on both ends so I can reach in and clean it out, fill the feeder and waters without having to stand on my head!

Since it's still a little cold and breezy, we stapled strips of cardboard around the bottom to keep the air off of them.

So far, so good.  I have since put a long feeder in there since they all want to crowd around one like this although there were two feeders in the brooder box like this.

Look...the chickie/brooder house is next to some blueberry bushes and they are beginning to bud out.  Surely spring is aound the corner!