Happy cheeping

In a quiet moment, just before bed, Noah told me that his favourite friend is Brooke, the eight year old girl up the road. He has been quite challenging lately, wilfully disobedient as Em and I never were as children, but when he told me earnestly in his quiet and confiding voice that Brooke was his favourite friend it was very sweet, like he had given me a little present.


Chatterbox Salmony is an only chick. Sadly none of the other eggs hatched and so after about 25 days we took the eggs away at night and returned Chatterbox to her mum, along with a broken egg shell for added effect. She was quickly ushered under a wing and snuggled up in her Gladys’s warm feathers. We don’t know why the eggs didn’t hatch but we have a few theories. It could have been that she was sitting on too many - she had ten for most of the time and she looked like she was struggling to cover them all. Or maybe it was because she kicked the straw out and the eggs were just sitting on the cold plastic of the lawnmower catcher with no insulation from the cold underneath. Next time we will give her a different box, and not quite so many eggs. Until then Chatterbox is happy cheeping and peeping with her mum as she shows her how to do chooky things like gobble up worms.