Houston we have a live one!

We are now at Day 7 of incubating our eggs.

Watching eggs incubate is sort of like watching the grass grow in your backyard (and remember we sit under a grove of tall pines resulting in soil so acidic it makes you pucker, so you can only imagine how much fun that particular activity is).

One you place the eggs in the incubator (the “small” end, or the end that does not have the air sac, facing inward), there's not much to do except for obsessively checking the temperature and humidity every few minutes for the first couple of days.

You'll be happy to know that I now check on the eggs only about 5 times a day now that we are at the end of our first week.

The eggs sit, the motors gently whir, the dogs look into the gated area with interest, and we wait.

And wait.

On Sunday night (Day 3) I candled the eggs. My friend had dropped off his candling machine (a wooden box enclosing a 60 watt light bulb that has a small hole to which you hold up the egg.) He made this candler and has been using it for years. In a moment of genius, he added a soft nest of felt around the hole as one more bit of protection for the eggs.

Candling (or “HillyBilly ultrasound” - LUV! as one friend recently referred to it) works because eggs' shells are relatively thin and porous. Light passes through them (especially focused light) and when it does you can see structures inside.

You can do see this for yourself (and if you were a kid you probably have) if in a darkened room you hold your fingers in front of a flashlight. You'll be able to see the bones and some of the blood vessels inside of your hand. (mostly at the tip where there is not a lot of “meat” blocking the light.). Believe it or not, we are considered porous, which is why we can lose moisture out of our skin. The light uses this porousness to its advantage and passes on by.

Be careful when lifting the eggs for candling, my friend told me. Once he had picked up an egg and accidentally dropped it on top of another resulting in both of them cracking. My heart shifted at the loss.

You can probably imagine how nervous I was then getting ready to candle.

• The first thing I had to do was to disengage the turning arm of the incubator. Check.
• The next thing was to unplug the short chord of the turning machine so that you can lift the top of the incubator off. Check.
• Carefully (did I mention carefully?) remove the incubator and gaze down at the little pockets of potential life. Check and check.

Treating them as if they were newborns already, I gently picked up an egg making sure I knew which side was “up” so that I would know how to return it to the incubator. I held it to the candling machine not really expecting much.

I mean, I've had Emergency Technical Training (and who knew how useful that training would be when you decided to have 6 kids!) and I still have trouble finding people's pulses. What made me think I was going to be able to identify a 3-day-old embryo?

I gently rolled the egg and saw the yolk sac float to the top which is of course why it's so important to rotate the eggs regularly, the yolk sac, unlike a mammal placenta, is free floating and if it stayed in one and only one position, it would “cook too much” -- to use the scientific term.

Well that's pretty cool, I thought as I saw the big blobby yolk float upward.

Then I noticed a small concentrated dark spot inside the yolk.

And the spider web blood vessels surrounding it.

I held my breath.

Houston, we have a live one.

Remember when you saw the first ultrasound of your baby, that tiny amorphous blob with a pulsating beat and you thought, “Holy cow, this is real!”?

That's how I felt seeing these eggs. Up until now it's been a theoretical experiment, something I've read about in books, something I've heard about other people doing.

One by one I candled the eggs and it looks like 10 of the 11 eggs had growth in them. I didn't and won't remove the questionable one until I know with absolute certainty that there is no growth inside.

As we started the eggs at the same time, they will all roughly be at the same level of growth, when it becomes obvious that a chick is in a few eggs and nothing is in others, that's when I'll get rid of the non-growers.

That doesn't mean of course that we are going to have 10 chicks because as well all know (and repeat after me) you can't count your chickens before they've hatched. Any of a number of things can happen.

• The temps can be wrong.
• The humidity can be wrong.
• The eggs can (for a million reasons) stop growing.
• I might accidentally damage them (oh heaven forbid)

On the other hand, they might just grow up to be strong baby chicks. Like virtually everything else in life, we won't know until we know.

What I do know right now, is that there are eggs incubating on our first floor so if you come to the house, keep your voice down we've got babies sleeping down there.

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For more information on these eggs and our flock, visit my blog Simple Thrift