I Married a Crazy Chicken Lady

My wife is a wonderful woman. I love her beyond measure. But she's gone completely crazy since we moved here.

See, this spring we decided to get a few chickens. Not too many, just a few egg-layers that would provide us with some free eggs in exchange for being fed and kept in a decent coop. Well, the 'few' turned into twenty-one chickens: six roosters and fifteen hens. Well, that's not too bad. The coop gives them plenty of room, they've got some nice roosting spots, and they're laying eggs every day. Not all of them, but they are pretty regular.

Well, last week she decided that it was time to expand our chicken enterprise.

So, today she picked up thirty day-old chicks. These are meat birds; they'll be around for eight weeks, and then they're going to the processor and to the freezer. We'll probably sell some of them; they're supposed to be bigger birds, lots of meat. Sounds good to me. We might have gotten fifty due to the way the orders were processed at the seller, but we did end up with the thirty we had originally planned for.

She brought Garrett, our autistic youngest, with her. When he saw the little chicks, he asked the seller, "Where's their mother?" Which, for anyone who knows autistic children, is awesome. He kept asking the question, and he was pointing at another group of chicks. Ten of them. These ones were layers, not meat birds. And they were two dollars apiece. So, my wife came home with forty chicks.

Or so I thought.

While I was typing this post, I overheard her talking on the phone with her father. I didn't hear it all, but I did hear 'Glen doesn't know' and 'coop,' which set all kinds of alarms jangling. So, I ran downstairs and finally dragged it out of her.

She bought seven more laying hens. Hens, not chicks. There are now twenty-eight birds in the coop, and forty chicks in boxes. The boxes are in my son's bedroom to keep them warm for a couple of weeks. I've put two heat lamps in there for them as well. They're quite noisy; it's almost eleven o'clock, and they're still chirping away.

Well, we won't go hungry this winter.