Incubation Speculation

Day ten of twenty-one.

So our little incubator is jerry-rigged out of a Styrofoam cooler, some mini-loaf pans, a dish scrubber,a string of garden lights and a meat thermometer (the latter two items were both gifts on separate occasions from our neighbor Randy. How fitting since he and his wife Colleen are our chicken-sitters whenever we go out of town...). The "instructions" say to turn the eggs up to five times a day, keep the temperature at 102F with the relative humidity somewhere around something percent so that the eggs don't dry out (hence the dish sponge which we keep wet all the time). How do you know if the eggs are incubating? After the passing of Chicker, I suppose the next worse thing after all of the anticipation is to realize we didn't so it right and that the eggs won't hatch. Hmmm. Is it possible to stage a hatching?? Broken eggshells and three fluffy chicks from the IFA suddenly appear in the incubator one morning. "Brahm, Oliver! Come see what happened last night!"