Party in the coop tonight!!

It's a good thing I don't have too many snow days because I might inundate the blogosphere with mundane and boring posts about my chickens. As it stands, this is my second post of the day and as soon as it's posted I'm going to post another one!! I meant to blog some more about what else we did on our snow day. Well..........we had a failure situation with the Christmas goodies we tried to make. More on that later, perhaps. The other thing the ol' DH and I did was to hook up a heat lamp in the chicken coop. It's supposed to get really cold tonight and tomorrow. Cold as in negative temps. I know you have frost growing on the walls in Montana, Anne..........but I personally do not love supercold weather. :-) Anyhow, I wanted to be sure my little chooks were warm (relatively speaking) so we hooked up the heat lamp that we had used for them when they were chicks in our bathroom this summer. We had some figgerin' to do since we couldn't fully close the door to the coop with the extension cord looped through it. DH was concerned that having light all night would upset their rhythms so to speak. I figured that would be better than freezing to death. That's why I titled this post "party in the coop" in case they are out there partying all night in the light and warmth instead of roosting like they usually do. I couldn't resist peeking through the window once it got dark to see if they were living it up. When I peeked in I saw 5 little "fuzzy-butts" (that's what my peeps on Backyard Chickens call their chickens) all in a row up on their roost, just like usual.



Below you can see a photo I took right after we hooked up the lamp. It's infrared so it casts a reddish glow on everything. Hopefully it is positioned just right to keep the water from freezing tonight.










Here's the lamp, suspended from a hook on one of the rafters.






After some figgerin' and after attaching a hook and eye to the door, the DH and I decided it would be best to just cut a notch out of the door frame to allow the cord to pass through. I felt that the hook and eye remedy was allowing too much of a gap and I didn't want my little darlings to have a cold draft blowing in on them all night. One little zzzzzzzzzzzzzzt of the reciprocating saw and the job was done. Love it!!





In other chicken news...........I wanted to share something very very cute that my youngest son has been doing lately. First of all, I've meant to blog about the fact that over the past several days my two boys have had the BEST time playing together and have done so (without too much pounding and crying) for long periods of time. I am not always sure what they're playing, but they've been having fun. In the course of their play my little boy found this stuffie that my husband got at a science-y conference. It is supposed to be a model of the Salmonella bacteria. My little boy has decided to call this stuffed bacteria his "chicken". He named it Chicken and has been carrying it around, loving on it and telling me how much he loves it, asking me to pet it, etc. For quite a while yesterday Chicken was living in his nest which happens to be the pocket of the sweatshirt I usually wear around the house. It's very cute and is one of those memories that could be easily forgotten if not documented. So..........I snapped a quick photo of Chicken to help us remember him once he becomes a forgotten playmate. He actually does kind of look like a chicken, and very much like our favorite chicken, Sarah.