We're Getting Chickens!...

            Well, hopefully. Now that we've done our research and are actively looking for the specific kind we want, we've been running into several snags. But I'll get to that in another post.
            So, what on God's green Earth would possess us to want to raise chickens all of a sudden? Let me give you a little background information. Obviously, we are constantly looking for ways to green up our everyday lives (hence the blog title) and be healthier with less crap (extra ingredients/chemicals-wise in food, bath & body items, etc.). However, we're really bad about still eating crap, processed food. This has been kind of funny in an ironic way because my brother and sister in-law have been preaching clean eating since I have known them. I joke with my husband that if we were more like them and ate better, less processed food and they were more like us in the "not wanting to use toiletries with 50 billion ingredients I can't even pronounce" department, all four of us would be the perfect "green livers". lol

            However, John and I both are the completely stubborn type and prefer to learn things the hard way for ourselves. If you've been around here for any length of time, you know that we feed Myka WAY more healthy food than ourselves. Now that she is FINALLY starting to eat solid food, though, I am encountering a lot of issues. Neither one of us is a big fan of giving children juice to begin with, but we try to find ones that have the least amount of crap in them. It wasn't until Myka started skipping a nap every day and bouncing off the walls that I even thought to check how much sugar was in the juice we were giving her. Let's just say it was appalling.
            Ok, so no more juice for her until we go to the store and find one with no or WAY less sugar. We're eating our shared morning snack the next day, which happened to be a delicious little fig newton type thing I got from the natural/organic section at Kroger. I'm sitting there eating a bite and thinking, "Man, this is REALLY sweet." I look at the ingredients and am appalled again when I see that out of the first three, one is dried cane syrup and the other brown rice syrup. Well, that totally defeated the point of not giving her juice that day, huh? Not to mention I probably shouldn't even be eating it since my blood sugar has been going nuts lately.
            Like most parents, I care about my daughter more than anything in the world. I want the best for her, especially when it comes to food. John and I don't want her to end up with bad eating habits like us. (We're working on that, which I'll get to, I swear.) The two little things mentioned above were the last straw. I am now on a mission to start making as many everyday food items as I can. I am sick of store bought food with extra crap and unnecessary fillers. I'm so worried about what we put ON our bodies, now is the time to start worrying about what we're putting IN to them as well.
            So yes, in a roundabout way, that is why we are getting chickens. It makes me want them even more now that we've researched (Ok. John's done most of the researching.) them and learned about the less than satisfactory "standards" in which most chickens are allowed to live, egg washing in the U.S., etc. (There will be a post on egg washing some time in the future. You'll be as shocked as I was if you have no idea what I'm talking about right now.)
            Some day, if we ever have the resources, we would love to have land out in the country and really get into the whole modern homesteading thing with even more livestock. I would love to have a couple of dairy goats to make cheese and some lovely goats milk soap from. I have a weird obsession with sheep (just ask my husband), so I would love, love, love to have a sheep as well. Wool anyone? ;) But, until then, I'm taking small steps at home to live a more sustainable life.