Lil' Dot

I never blogged about Peanut's baby, and here she is nearly a week old! Peanut was setting eggs, you may remember. She had 5 of them, but only one hatched. One extremely spoiled, doted-upon baby chick. We named her Lil Dot because a) she looks like a baby barred cochin except for one single reddish-brown dot on her head that tells us she truly is her auburn-feathered mother's chick, and b) she is named after our friend Dottie, who was a commercial chicken farmer's wife for years and loves Barred Rocks.

Lil Dot seems tinier than her half sisters/brothers, who are being raised by Eowyn, were, but I may just be remembering wrong. They are big, clumsy, half-feathered, dorky looking chicks now, not much "cute" left, but Dot makes up for it in the cuteness department.

Yesterday we let Peanut decide if she was ready to introduce Lil Dot to the flock, and after thinking it over, she decided she was. The Colonel helped, running interference between Lil Dot and her bigger siblings and breaking up potential battles between the ladies before they could get started. Cinderella is the odd hen out now, since she is the only one who has not gone broody and raised babies, and she gets beaten up by both hens if she so much as takes a step toward any of the chicks. Poor thing.

Last night I was in the kitchen, noisily washing dishes while at least two neighbors were running their lawn mowers, and yet over all that racket I still heard Lil Dot's anguished cries as she ran around the chicken pen looking for her mom, who had forgotten about her and gone to bed! I had to go gather her up and put her in the chicken house, where Peanut gave her a look like, "Oh, there you are," and tucked her underneath her feathers.

We optimistically give all the babies girls' names because we can only keep them if they are hens, so we are hoping for the best. The two older chicks are Tilly and Junie B., though I can't tell which is which.