Chicken sitting

This past year or more, mostly when I was trapped on bedrest while pregnant and had nothing but the interwebs to entertain me, I discovered Urban Homesteading. I threw myself into this idea as much as possible. I had mixed results, mostly due to the fact I was still on bedrest and/or had a newborn for the spring and summer. The majority of my work has been cooking and baking, learning to sew and make a few pieces of clothing from our old clothes instead of the massive garden I dreamed of. Regardless of this, I got a lot done on our property, had a little bit of a harvest, and know some things we need to do differently next year. The highlight of my pride was the pumpkin pie I served at Thanksgiving was 100% grown and prepared by our family. It was the most delicious pie I ever tasted!
Anyway, our wonderful neighbors are surprisingly like us as far as homesteading/homeschooling/sustainable/handmade living, the big difference being they are Hippie Christian Republicans (HCR) instead of Hippie Witches. (I find this to be awesome in it's rarity!)They possess on their Urban farm something I have coveted and lobbied for during our transformation from a yard to a homestead...chickens! Oh how I long for chickens, but the Hubs has vetoed it at every turn. When the neighbors got chickens and ducks this spring, I saw it as the chance to show the Hubs how easy and awesome it would be to have chickens of our very own. They were our test run. He agreed to observe closely the whole chicken owning and care process to see if his ideas about it were truth or misconception. All this summer I could see him softening, but tried not to push my chicken agenda too hard. My plan was to let him store all the info, then have a discussion about adding chickens to our homestead next spring. The HCR family is currently in Iowa (out of the fridge and into the freezer, huh!) and we are chicken sitting. I noticed that the Hubs day by day taking over the job or going over to feed the chickens and duck, and this morning when I went over he was advising me that their water trough was frozen so he put a bowl in the coop for water and I should water, feed, then top off the water they drank. Golden! Score! We are so getting chickens! His only stipulation now is that we get a couple duck's too...Bonus! Thanks for going home to visit your family HCR.
H.W.