Day 10 and 11: Half-way there!

I can't believe we are almost half-way through our journey to hatch the chicks! The babies inside the eggs should start looking a little like chicks over the next couple of days. I'm wondering what we will call each chick. This is our list of names from last year:

Walter
Patrick
Vincen
Perseus
Ginny
Linus
Theodore
Edgar
Suzanne
Carly
Charlie Brown
Henny Penny
Bella
Ellie

Just so you know, we paid no attention to their gender at all. We are not at all skilled in determining this, so we just sort of named what we felt like. Most of our names had very specific reasons for getting the names they got. Patrick hatched on St. Patrick's Day. Perseus was named after Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. Ginny was named for Ginny Weasley in the Harry Potter books. Linus and Charlie Brown are, of course, Peanuts characters. Charlie Brown was so named because he had a really hard time getting out of his shell. I think we even helped him out which is generally not what real chicken raisers do. I think they figure if the chick is too weak to get out of their shell, they will be too weak to thrive. In Charlie Brown's case, our incubator did not have enough humidity so he just stuck to the shell all over the place!

Henny Penny is pretty self-explanatory. Edgar was a black chick and was named for Edgar Allan Poe. Bella was named for the character in the Twilight series. Suzanne was named for me (but not by me!). She was first named during the first candling. She was a tiny speck whizzing around her egg with such energy that there was nothing to call her but Suzanne. Vincen was named by one of my assistant's sons. My other assistant named Walter after Walter the Farting Dog. Carly was named by a local kindergarten class after iCarly. Theodore was named after Alvin and Chipmunks. (An aside: I love Alvin and the Chipmunks. I can just hear the theme song now..."Alvin, Simon, Theodore! Do, do, dodododo...do, do, dodododo!")

And, we can't remember how Ellie got her name. Well, we can't keep track of everything, can we.