Whelp! Today's day 16. I doubt anything's gonna hatch, though. She layed 6 eggs w/in 9 days & on day 11 I didn't want to wait any longer (I heard the eggs are only viable up to 14 days) so I put them in the incubator. (1) But I wasn't rotating them in her cage before I collected them and IDK if she was rolling them around or not. So who knows how that'll go. (2) Plus the first 2-3 days I was going by the thermometer on the outside of the lid, which was saying 99-101 but the one I put inside and layed on top of the eggs was saying 96-98. So then I turned it up slightly and started going by the one on top of the eggs as someone had suggested. So is that gonna ruin the eggs? (3) Then on day 5, I had a dentist appt & had 2 wisdom teeth pulled. I was on pain meds & feeling like crap, so I was laying down taking a nap & my husband decided to 'be nice' and rotate the eggs for me. Well, instead of rocking them from side to side, he flipped them end over end and the fat end where the air sac is was pointing down. Lovely. Well my kids rotated for the rest of the day and also 1st thing in the morning and they never noticed. So 2nd rotation that morning, "I" did it, and that's when I noticed and turned them the right way. So it was over 1/2 a day but less than a full day. (4) I thought humidity was supposed to be around 55-65% so every time it dropped to 50%, I added a small splash of water. Only I didn't know how tiny of an amt you actually NEED, so it'd jump to like 70-80% and I'd just leave it alone & let it come back down again & the next time add even less. Then someone else told me that it's not the same as chickens & Button Quail are supposed to be 40-50%. So IDK if all that extra humidity in the beginning is going to have an affect or not? (5) the morning of day 14 I added a little more water to get them up to the 70% range that they're supposed to be at for hatching. But then the next day it dropped way down again and I had to add a tiny amt more. Then this morning, day 16, I wake up and it's at 42-44% & I had to add more water again. Everyone keeps telling me to stay out of there and do NOT open it during the final 3 days, but if the humidity's at 40-50% what am I supposed to do? I kinda have to. (6) OH! I was also trying to mark X & O on it like it says to, but the pen ever so slightly cracked one of the shells. So I really feel like I have done everything possible wrong, here. I realize that we all don't know what we're doing and have to learn at some point & we all start at ground zero and learn from there, but still....I just feel like crap about it. I've sat here & in other groups and listened to so many other people talking about hatches, trouble shooting, tips & ideas, things that went bad and how to avoid them, and etc... but yet, here I sit, still making mistakes. What do you guys think? Do you think they're pretty much ruined? They're too dark of a color to candle. That and plus they're too small to fit in the candler, so even w/me wrapping my finger & thumb around them, it still wouldn't illuminate the egg so I could see in it. So I'm really kinda going at this blindly.
