Right after we got back from the ski trip it was time to get the FFA chicks! It was a bit of a shock to our systems to go from having absolutely no extracurriculars to having 150 baby chicks and having all three kids in basketball all in the same week…

Wallace is old enough to be in FFA now, and he wanted to raise chicks too, so that doubled our load. I thought we were fully prepared for this though. I mean, we had pretty good success with Anna last year. So, we set up the spare garage, ordered the feed, and got down to business.

Everything started out okay. When we picked them up we were informed that one of Wallace’s birds had lost a wing band, which is kind of bummer, but that’s just one bird out of 75…no biggie. We went ahead and took it home to feed out. And took all sorts of fun baby chicken pics while they were super cute!

Then the next day we found a few loose wing bands in his shavings…and the wing band nightmare began. For the next several days I just continued to find wing band after wing band… Every band represented a bird we would be unable to show. When we got to 10 the ag teacher and I were both pulling our hair out… When would this stop??? I’d never heard of this happening to anyone before. I was no longer having fun, and I honestly wasn’t handling the stress of it very well. How would I explain this to Wallace? “Sorry bud…someone didn’t band your birds correctly, so you’re just getting a raw deal this year…” I didn’t know where to start. It was just so upsetting to find band after band after band. The ag teacher was a miracle worker though. She did what I thought was honestly impossible. She got the extension service to reband the birds! We ended up taking 20 in all back to College Station. Some still had their bands, but they were getting close to falling off…so we took them too. It was like someone breathed new life into that garage full of birds that day!

So…being back on track…the birds quickly hit their ugly teenager phase….

And everything really progressed great from there. We were plugging along…stretched way too thin between all the basketball practices and getting up early to feed chickens. The kids and I were so exhausted. There were nights Anna would get in late from basketball, would be crying because she was so tired and knew she’d have to get up early, and it would just break my heart… And other days when everyone was just good to go. Having twice the chickens in the garage meant we had to change out their shavings twice as often. Twice a week. It was an effort every time. The kids were such troopers. And Wallace got his own snow shovel (which…ended up coming in handy for several reasons…more on that later) which we’ve found to be the easiest tool for scooping up shavings in the garage.

I think one of the things that added to our stress was the decision to try to take some chickens to the San Antonio show this year. The thought of showing at a major really freaked me out. When I showed hogs at majors as a kid I pretty much just walked straight through the sift every time… I never really even made it to the show. So, knowing that we would be taking our best birds to San Antonio really had me on edge the whole time.

When it came time to sort the birds for the San Antonio show, just a few days before the show, the ag teacher felt Wallace had 4 birds that were in good shape, but Anna only had 2. You have to show 3, and you can’t mix up the birds…Wallace’s birds belong to Wallace, Anna’s birds belong to Anna…. Anna was devastated. She cried for hours. It’s very hard as a parent to watch that. In many ways I’m glad that we had a whole other pen of birds that we can compare to so she didn’t take her best birds to SA just to have them taken away from her so that she couldn’t show them in Comal… but I wanted so bad for her to be able to show in SA as well. It was a rough night.

So, the next night we worked with the ag teacher to determine Wallace’s 4 best birds that we would take for certain (we’d pick the final three in the car in the parking lot at the show), and then on the morning of the show…it was a little icy… BUT we just slowly drove over there. And it was so worth it! Although we were in the second call back class, Wallace’s birds managed to make it through that sift. Josh and I looked at each other like “Well, all right!” And we kept telling Wallace “Bud…this is so awesome, you’ve done so well to get this far at a major!” Then as we competed against the 3rd callback class we made it through again!!!! I mean you literally could have knocked me over with a feather. I just couldn’t believe it. And as we were in the arena with the fourth and final call back class, all I knew was that there were two pens in the arena that weren’t going to make the sale. I was so worried we were one of them. It was driving Josh bananas. And we’d literally been in the arena for nearly 3 hours, which is just not normal at all for a chicken show. We just weren’t apparently sorted well in the pre-sift when we arrived I guess. We all ended up getting pooped on. Wallace literally had his chicken poop on his face! It was exhausting, and we were starving. But he ended up 18th place! Which is not bad considering only 35 make the sale. We were beyond thrilled.

And then all hell broke loose. Literally! I mean, the snow was cute for like a day, but then once we lost power and water, it was no longer cute. We ran out of fire wood… So, we cut up what we had in the yard. We pulled our ski clothes (that it took me over a month to put away) out of the attic, and did the best we could. As one point we drove up to Josh’s Mom’s place in Blanco to cut more fire wood for ourselves, my Mom, and some of Josh’s work friends. Nothing really sets you back to pioneers days quite like losing your indoor water… Can’t say I really enjoyed catching snow melt off the roof to flush my toilets. Pretty sure my neighbors didn’t either.

In hindsight, it would have been nice to have some pool water available, but…I’ve seen a lot of people still dealing with pool pump issues from the freeze, so…maybe this was a blessing in disguise.

This is a photo of my dog literally running away from me. We didn’t see her again for 6 hours. Finally got a call from a neighbor who found her.

Then it all slowly got better… And believe it or not, a week after that SA show, we had the Comal chicken show. It seemed impossible. These poor chickens had been through so much. I struggled to keep them warm, discovered they might actually prefer being closer to 50 degrees, but probably not so much 40…and then they had to deal with us changing their shavings in the middle of it all.

The Comal show went well, but not without drama. Wallace did great with his pullets (female birds). He got 6th overall. Wasn’t expecting that! So, a blue ribbon. He hit every goal we could have set this year.

Anna was in the final 8 with her cockerels when one of hers unfortunately died of a heart attack. :( It happens. We’ve recovered from this, but it was tragic. She ended up in 8th place. Still a blue ribbon. She wanted to do better, so I know that probably bothers her, but she really did just fantastic. She also decided to compete in chicken showmanship, which I love at this show. It tests the kids on their knowledge of chickens and also tries to feel them out for how much they participated in the raising of the chicks. She won Jr. Showmanship!!!!! She got her first belt buckle! Y’all. That’s a really big deal. So big in fact that I will (for the first time ever) break my fancy pants camera picture rule for my blog and post an iphone photo here….

So….after all that, we’ll see if these kids ever want to raise chickens again. I think I want to.