Spring Chickens!

Are we talking about our feathered friends here, or are we talking about our kids?

We are talking about BOTH!

Just like chickens, children grow up fast. It's a wonderful idea to create precious family memories by building a backyard chicken coop! Take advantage of these special windows in time.

Not everyone can live on a farm, but the addition of a few hens into the backyard can be a much more attainable idea. The experiences of responsibility, stewardship and biology gained from exposing our kids to these kinds of realities can have long lasting positive implications. Learning where their food comes from, natural cycles, how to take care of one another and lessons of life and death are all behaviors that can be fostered in children through the involvement of raising these delightful creatures.

Not everybody is going to be a lawyer or a doctor, so it's good to teach kids it's OK to work with their hands and build cool stuff. We had our son involved every step of the way through the entire process of building our coop. Here he is busy building nesting boxes.

The coop below has finally come together.

I have added some hand-painted flowers to liven it up a bit.

There are two varieties of chickens I highly recommend. The Ameraucana, also known as the Easter Egg Chicken, recognized for their colorful eggs which appear in shades of blue, green and pink. The other variety I love is the Barred Rock. A very dependable egg layer, and a great personality.

Nothing tastes as great as fresh, farm raised eggs. There is a huge difference from what you get at the grocery store!

"Can You Guess the Homegrown Egg?" Garden Betty RSS. N.p., n.d. Web. 26 Feb. 2016.

The first thing we noticed with raising backyard chickens, was not only how great the eggs taste, but how the yolk color was so dramatically different! Chickens need more than corn feed to stay healthy. Besides their pellet food, they need vegetables, table scraps, grass and insects. Letting your chickens out of their pen for an hour a day to roam around your garden will keep your yard pest free, and you will applaud the rich, dark orange yolks that will taste amazing!

We had some friends that didn't want the long term commitment of chickens. Instead they chose to raise ducklings to later be released in a friend's nearby pond.

So many of our kids are trapped inside a virtual reality. Don't let your kids grow up without learning the real life experiences raising pets can bring!

Need to satisfy the critter hugging demands of your kiddos right now?

Clear Image Portrait Studio in Marysville, Wa is bringing in soft, sweet, warm ones for your kids to hold during the month of March for our special Bunny Portrait Sessions!

We provide the bunnies, you provide the smiles!

Call us today at 360.653.5005. clearimageportrait.com

CLEAR IMAGE since 1988 | "Artists at Heart, Professionals in Action"