Chicken keeping has been keeping me busy! We decided it was time for new chicks because we only had two Buff Orpingtons and they were slowing down egg production. They were only three years old, but I guess if you spend your engery laying an egg every day for two years, that can happen.

About a year ago, I learned from our chicken vet  that Lavender Orpingtons were for sale in our area. He described them in such a way that I had to get some.

(So the adventure begins. It is really long and you will think I am a crazy chicken lady by the time you are done with this story!)

I went hunting Lavender chicks. Little did I know this would be so troublesome and lead to general hysteria in our household, crowing hens, calls to the vet and desperate runs to the feed store when I should be working.

After looking all over the Internet for lavender chicks and not finding any, I heard a tip from a place called The East County Zoo (they sell chickens not elephants) that a woman in Alpine raised lavender Orpingtons.  I was very thankful for the help of East County Zoo, although my husband wishes I had never heard of them.

Alpine is near my horse so I thought, “Great, I will talk to this chicken lady and go get my chicks one day after visiting Bayito. The kids will love it.”  Sometimes I have to find fun things for the kids and husband to do on the way to see the horse. It is a long, boring drive.

I made a fun day for the family out at the ranch, and our big excitement was going to the chicken lady, who it turns out told me she had lavender chicks, but then when I called to confirm we were coming, told me she didn’t. They hadn’t hatched yet.

You can’t cancel a trip to pick out chicks when your two little girls are so excited and have planned this for about a year. So we decided to go anyway, and the chicken lady told me she would drive the lavender chicks to me in San Diego when they hatched, and we would have a chick delivery.

We would pick up the other two chicks that day and since each of us agreed we would get our own, the girls could each pick one.

There is a reason I call this lady the chicken lady. It will become clear as this story goes on.

Also, notice in the pictures we have five chicks and not three. This will also become clear. We also do not have a Lavender Orpington…I think we have an Ameraucana frizzle, but we are not sure what she is. We don’t even know if she is a chicken. Sometimes she looks like a dove.

It has all taken hours of research and left very little time for anything else!  I will continue this story tomorrow and start with the Chicken Lady.