Baby Chicky

My brother has had an incubator in our kitchen for three weeks. He's got chicken eggs and duck eggs, which is a school project since he's the new ag teacher at the local high school. We thought one of the eggs was hatching last week, when I looked in and say bits of shell on the floor of the incubator. I woke Josh up and he excitedly ran into the kitchen, only to find some yellow ooze weeping from the shell - it had been crushed by the motor that is supposed to gently turn the eggs.

Last night I had a dream that the eggs hatched, and the ducks came out looking like they were make from slick black latex, and I forget what the chickens looked like. I woke up this morning, took the dogs out (to find a pile of shit in the floor that had a human footprint in it - I'm sure josh was thrilled when he found THAT on his shoe, thanks Bonnie - then I went back to bed, having checked to see no babies hatching. Then aboutan hour later, I woke up to the strangest sound, something I couldn't place. I went into the kitchen and there was a baby chicky crawling out of its shell! So I called Josh at school and he told me to put it in a box under a lamp, which is what I did, and I've been staring at the little thing for thirty minutes. It's got a set of lungs on it, that's for sure.

I'm just glad it is a normal chicky... My grandma said she and my grandfather had an old incubator one that wa faulty, and the current kept turning off throughout the gestation period. When the chickies finally hatched, they were all deformed. She said one had no beak, one was all tilted to the side, some had extra or no legs, so my grandfather "pulled their heads off" as my grandma told me. Lovely thought.