Arrival Day
We moved from our suburban "American Dream" home to the 10 country acres of our homestead on a rainy Spring day in 2016. We were so excited to get started on our homesteading adventure that we began planning gardens, gathering beekeeping equipment, and picking out chicken breeds as soon as our offer on the property was accepted. Our planning, though, moved quite a bit faster than the purchase of the new place.
As those kinds of things go, our move-in date was delayed several times before we actually picked up the keys to the little log home that we would soon call the Happy Homestead. I wanted to make sure that we could raise the baby chicks on the homestead during the summer and fall months before the cold northern winter weather hit, so we ordered them (really, you order baby chicks and they come in the mail) in early spring several weeks before they were set to hatch...and several weeks before the possession date was moved back (three times!).
The big move-in day finally arrived. We were busy carrying furniture and boxes into the moving truck when I received a phone call from a noticeably irritated postmaster at the post office in our new small town. He had a box full of three day old baby chicks that had arrived several days before we anticipated them. The carrier, thankfully, was unable to deliver them to an empty house so they were returned to the post office where they were being held for pick up. The postmaster didn't seem to be too happy about taking care of the homestead's first flock and requested that I pick them up ASAP. I quickly packed the dogs into my already overflowing car and we took off to rescue the girls from the grumpy postmaster. After finally locating the post office, I attempted to make friends with the post office staff (they weren't having any of it), picked the girls up, and headed to the homestead, beating the moving truck by a couple of hours.
The chicks were the first to enter the Happy Homestead home, where they lived comfortably in the dining room for a couple of months while their feathers grew in and Dan built the chicken run and coop...you know, cart before the horse. We jumped right into homesteading with Ginger, Big Betty, Lucy, Laverne, Esther, Fran, Fern, and Kip moving in before Dan! Though, we won't rub that in. In the fall of 2017, we welcomed Mr. Orpington, also known as Orps, into the flock where he has fit right into the family and the farm.
