A long story describing God's faithfulness among my madness.

Unless you are a very close friend or family member, there is something you may not know about me. I have a problem with addiction. No, I'm not addicted to alcohol, drugs or tobacco.....caffeine 🤔 well we won't go there. My addiction is chickens. I don't know if it is their soft downy fuzz, the way they talk to one another, how they chase each other if they think one of them has a treat, but I love chickens and more specifically baby chicks. Now, this is not my first rodeo with having chicks, we've had them before and we somehow ended up with 20, but life got hectic and living in the suburbs there is only so many you can have before your neighbors complain (not that they have, my one neighbor loves them not to mention that I bribe them with fresh eggs) so we gave them to a friend who had some land. So when my husband first suggested to me back in March that he wanted to have chickens again.....I said, "Ok, but only a small flock this time around 6-8 laying hens. We are NOT going to go crazy like last time (FTR - I was the one who went crazy last time) So we went to Tractor Supply and picked out 8 chicks. He wanted to try meat chickens and since you only keep them 8-10 weeks before their "one bad day" he picked up 6 of those at Rural King. A week later, I went to Rural King, bc 5 of the chicks we had gotten last time (they were a few weeks old when we got them) turned out to be roosters 🙄 so I went to get a few more layers and also to see if they had a specific breed I wanted. They did, and I went home with 6 chicks (two of them were meat chickens), because they don't let you buy fewer than 6 at a time. A few weeks later, I went into Rural King to pick up some *cough, cough* chicken feed, and the happened to have some of another breed I wanted so I went home with 6 more (are you doing the math here?.....we now have 25 because one of the meat chickens had died, but 4 are bantams (miniature) so those count as a half chicken right?). There were still a couple of breeds I wanted to add to my flock, but enough is enough already right? Sunday, hubby gave me a gift card to Rural King.....I know, oh boy. I really struggled with getting more chicks.....there were a few more that I wanted but I was willing to wait until next year, but then again there was that gift card burning a hole in my pocket, so after debating and talking to hubby and figuring out how we could downsize a little, we went to Rural King and came home with SEVEN more (hey they gave me a good price on them). 😂 I didn't tell hubby about the 7th one until we were out of the store. My boys came into my room later that night and said I had a problem. I asked if this was an intervention....they said, "well, we don't like to use that term, but yes" 😂

I have always been blessed with healthy chicks, we had lost a few, but that was usually due to predators. When we arrived home, one of the chicks (a breed I had been wanting ever since I saw a mother hen with her clutch of chicks several years ago) wasn't acting right. It wasn't eating, drinking, or chortling with the other chicks. All it wanted was to be in the heat cave (I like to try and do things naturally, so when I read about the Mama heat cave as an alternative to a heat lamp, I tried it and had great success with it with the last batch of chicks I got). I made some electrolytes for it and tried to get it to drink with a dropper. I also coaxed it to eat a couple grains of food, but then off it went back into the heat cave. I honestly didn't think it would survive the night, so following the example of my mother when I was a child (we had a hamster that the cat had gotten and brought us this lifeless body. My mother prayer over that hamster and within a minute, it started to breathe again, soon it hopped back up and was good as new. Maybe it was dead, or maybe it was in shock, either way God showed his faithfulness to that young child)and I prayer over the little chick. This morning, when I woke up, I checked on the chick. It was alive, but still lethargic, so I gave it some more electrolytes. This time it drank it without so much coaxing, again it ate a few grains of feed and went back to get warm. I decided to check it's vent to make sure it wasn't clogged, I couldn't see the vent, so gave it a little bottom bath until I could see it, blew dry it gave it some water and put it back in the brooder to get warm. It actually hung out for a minute before going to get warm. Again, I told God that I had done all that I could and the rest was up to Him. A couple of hours later I went to check on it and it was running around with the rest of them eat, drinking and cheeping. I cannot tell you how happy and thankful I am with His answer to my prayer and yes, this is my last batch of chickens......for now.