The end of June marked the beginning of one of the longest months I’ve had in years.

I was two weeks into owning peachicks. I had lost one to circumstances beyond my control. And I had doubled down.

No.

Tripled down.

I had decided to hatch seven eggs myself while still recovering from six broken ribs, fully aware that my expected losses were somewhere around 70%.

This might be the part where my family started wondering about my sanity.

The Part Where I Waited For The Mail

I spent my days recuperating from the accident while happily mother-henning two small chicks. Han and Leia were thriving. I was vertical. Progress.

The eggs arrived a week later.

They had endured way too long in the hands of the US Postal Service. One of the things you’re supposed to be careful about when shipping eggs is transit time — especially if you have warm days or postal holidays.

I had both.

The seven eggs arrived just before the weekend. Had they gone one more day, I might not have had any viable eggs at all.

Into the incubator they went.

And because I am who I am, I started a spreadsheet to track their weight.

Of course I did.

Every week when I candled, I weighed each egg in grams and logged it. The humidity in the incubator got adjusted accordingly. If I was going to do this, I was going to do it right.

The Rings of Death

At one week, I candled them.

For those unfamiliar, candling is when you shine a light through the egg to see what’s happening inside. You’re looking for veins, movement, signs of life.

You’re also looking for rings of death.

That’s not me being dramatic. That’s the actual term. A dark ring inside the egg means the embryo stopped developing. Game over.

I spotted three.

By day fourteen, we lost another.

All four were discarded.

Seven eggs became three.

Here’s the thing I didn’t expect: part of me was relieved.

The math was working. The odds I’d been warned about were holding. And somewhere around day fourteen, reality started kicking in.

I had made this decision on heavy painkillers. I had ordered seven eggs while recovering from six broken ribs, running on optimism and whatever was left of my critical thinking skills.

What if the odds had been wrong?

What if I was staring down nine peacocks instead of the four I eventually ended up with?

James would have buried me in the backyard.

Three viable eggs felt… manageable. Three felt like the universe giving me an out I didn’t know I needed.

The Quiet Weeks

The next two weeks were easier.

The surviving embryos grew. They started twitching. Right before “lockdown” — the final days before hatch when you stop turning the eggs — all three were active.

One chirped at me through the shell that night.

Another kicked me through the egg wall. Literally. I touched the shell and got a tiny foot to the finger.

Our third egg — the largest of them all — was quiet. Not a lot of movement. Not a lot of airspace.

I told myself it was fine.

Lockdown

On the second day of lockdown, at 2 p.m., Chick 1 practically bounded out of the egg.

There was no slow unfolding. No delicate emergence. Just bam — wet, exhausted, and immediately making noise.

Chick 2 followed an hour later. Calmer. Quieter.

They were just Chick 1 and Chick 2 at this point. No names yet. Just two tiny aliens drying off under the heat lamp.

Then Chick 1 jumped the tall divider to get to Chick 2.

They huddled together like they’d known each other forever.

The One That Didn’t Make It

While they dried off and fluffed up, we waited for Egg 3.

The largest egg. The quietest egg.

It got the smallest of holes open.

Then stopped.

Nothing happened for an hour. Then two.

The books said leave it alone. The forums said the same. Some people do assisted hatches, but by the time I was ready to consider it, it was already too late.

Egg 3 never made it out.

The Math, Again

When the dust settled, we had two chicks.

Seven eggs. Three viable. Two hatched. One lost at the finish line.

25% survival rate.

Which meant we still had to make it through the next four months — the window where peafowl are most fragile — to call this anything close to a success.

They didn’t have names yet.

But they already had opinions about each other.

That much was clear.

Interestingly enough, Chick 1 and Chick 2 were Eggs 1 and 2 of the original seven. The largest. The healthiest. The ones that tracked ahead on every weigh-in from day one.

Science does science.