Friday Fun – Honey, Bring Home Some Chicks

I’m a tolerant, modern wife, so last week I sent Spouse out to pick up some chicks and bring more excitement into our lives.

Baby chickens, that is, to add to the 2 Rhode Island Red girls we already have.  Despite my professed dislike of chickens, I am jumping into this endeavor with both feet, because if I decide to do something, I am fully committed! (umm, maybe that wasn’t the right way to say that)

I wanted to get chicks and raise them so the kids can have the fun of handling the cute fluffiness while watching them grow and eventually produce eggs.  We studied different chicken breeds, asked friends who already have chickens and came up with the breeds we wanted to get.  As usual, all of our preparations didn’t matter, because the local farm store only had a couple of breeds, none of which we had researched.  And, as I learned, it is difficult to order only a few chicks online; most of the breeders have a 15 chick minimum, particularly in the spring.

So, Spouse came home with 4 Golden Comet chicks and 3 Buff Orpingtons.  Both types of chickens are good for backyard farms and are consistent egg layers.  Unlike most chickens, the sex of Golden Comet chicks is easily determined.  Due to a sex-linked color gene, male chicks are white while female chicks are more reddish-orange.  The breed is also a hybrid, obtained from mating 2 different chicken breeds together; i.e. you cannot mate 2 Golden Comets and get Golden Comet babies.

In addition to the chicks, Spouse also bought 2 ducklings!  Things that will grow into ducks, water animals! Our conversation went something like this:

Me:  “There are 2 ducklings in the box.  Why did you buy ducklings?”

Spouse: “Because they are so cute.  Did you see how cute they are?”

Me:  “What are we going to do with ducks?  Where are we going to put them?”

Spouse:  “They are going to live with the chickens.  You have all the other animals.  The ducklings are mine!”

Okay, no need to get crazy on me.

But as I feared, there is now a plan for a pond in the works.

As a friend on Facebook aptly said, “This is why you should never send your husband out looking for chicks!”