Are all first time hatchers this paranoid? You better believe it. Even when things go great we worry. It gets better with time but never totally goes away. The eggs and chicks make sure of that.
The way I understand it you have both guinea and chicken eggs in the incubator. I don't hatch guinea eggs but I just checked, it takes 26 to 28 days of incubation for them to hatch. Chickens are down for 21 days so I guess you started the guinea eggs a week early. I've done that with turkey eggs.
A problem with just hatching only chicken eggs is that the 21 day thing is just a guideline. I'd assume the 26 to 28 is the same for guineas. There are several different things that can cause it but it but it is not that unusual for chicken eggs to hatch a full day or even two early or late, whether in the incubator or under a broody hen. Average incubating temperature is a big one. If the incubator is a bit warm they can be early, if cool they can be late. But heredity, humidity, how and how long they were stored before incubation started, and just individual differences in the eggs can make a difference.
My chicken eggs are practically always early, whether under a broody hen or in my incubator. More often than not the first chicks hatch two full days early either way, but not always. Other people consistently have eggs hatch on time or a bit late. Often my hatches are over within 24 hours of the first chick hatching, sometimes the hatches drag on for over two full days. There is just nothing consistent about it. Then you complicated things by hatching both guinea and chicken eggs together.
Before a chick hatches it has a lot of work to do. It has to position itself, internal pip, learn to breathe air instead of live in a liquid world, absorb the yolk, do something to that gunk it lives in so it will dry out fluffy instead of all matted down, dry up blood vessels outside it's body and absorb the blood, and who knows what else. Some chicks do a lot of this before they external pip, some do a lot of it afterwards. So some chicks zip fairly soon after they external pip, some can take a very log time to zip. The ones that take a full day to go from external pip to zip can worry us.
One incubator hatch last year I had a chick hatch a full two days early. Then nothing for a full 24 hours. No pip, nothing. Then before I went to bed I saw a pip in another egg. When I woke up the next day the remaining 16 had hatched. They were still a little early compared to the 21 day thing but yes I was getting concerned when nothing happened for so long after the first one. I've been doing this for years.
Being nervous for your first hatch is normal. The way these chicks sometimes hatch doesn't help much for sure. As hard as it is the best thing you can do is be patient. There is nothing you can do at this phase that can help matters but there are some things you can do to hurt. Good luck in the rest of the hatch and keep us posted.
