Daisy's First Egg!!

Well done that chicken!! Or should I say "hen". Whatever...anyway, yesterday Daisy did something amazing. She laid her very first egg. Being a first time hen keeper and also a townie to boot, this was absolutely thrilling! I know, it sounds ridiculous, it's only an egg...chickens have been laying eggs for thousands of years. Okay, but this is no ordinary egg. It's special. Yesterday, when I got up at the crack of dawn to let them out of their coop, I noticed that Daisy seemed a bit out of sorts. Normally she is the first one out, she scratches about, comes up to me and so on. But yesterday she just kind of sat there doing nothing. Her face was rather red and she looked all puffed out, like twice her size. I thought she was sick, in fact, I thought she might even be dying and wrote as much on my FB status. One of my more informed friends assured me that Daisy was probably about to lay an egg. I wasn't sure I believed her. This didn't look like egg laying behaviour to me, not what I read about in the zillions of books and websites. Throughout the morning, I periodically checked on her before noticing that she had taken herself inside the coop. "Could she be laying an egg?"...I dared to wonder. At 12pm, Isabella and I went outside to see how she was and we were very happy to see that she was back to her normal self and was walking around cuckolding away non-stop. Isabella advised me to check the egg box "just in case". I said to her, "Don't get your hopes up - I'm sure there will be nothing in there." Of course, I mean, a chicken...laying an egg? What was she thinking? I proceeded to unlock the fort Knox that is the chicken coop, opened the nesting box door and nearly had kittens. There, sitting beautifully in the nest, was one perfect little brown egg. I was so shocked I quickly shut the door again and just stared blankly at Isabella, unable to say anything other than "Oh my God.". We both opened the door again and took loads of pictures of that egg, texting people, ringing people, updating FB all whilst squealing with delight. No doubt a farmer would be shaking his head with a mixture of amusement and pity. Anyway, we duly collected it and carefully placed it in one of our 500 egg cartons that we have been collecting for the past five years. We took yet more pictures of it sitting in the egg carton. So there we have it, our first egg laid by Daisy, the little brown hen. We haven't used it yet because it's a little on the small side so I'm waiting for her to lay another one which together should make one large egg...enough for some pancake batter for tomorrows breakfast. Three cheers for Daisy!