I’ll have to write another post later on about my decision to embark on being a crazy chicken lady. But for now, I must write down what became tears and belly laughs last night post dinner with my parents.
Covid-19 projects include hoarding toilet paper, which I haven’t done once by the way, making sourdough bread, which I have done and quite well I might add, AND backyard chickens. How hard can it be really? Just ask some friends and Pinterest will tell me the rest!
We are sitting in the living room and my Dad says to me, how do you know if you have all hens? I looked over at Chris and my Mom is listening intently. I pause almost as long as Justin Trudeau and respond with, “I thought all chickens were hens?”
Chris proceeds to smack his head and says, “you didn’t ask?”. I start to laugh nervously and say, “I don’t know, I just got what Rachel told me to get. A barnyard mix. It never occurred to me that there were boy chicks and girl chicks.”
My Dad starts singing “Green Acres” and says to my Mom that they clearly didn’t do a very good job with me. Mom, in her typical fashion starts grilling me asking why I didn’t do my research, “because normally you do a ton of research beforehand!”. “I DID DO MY RESEARCH!”, I say defensively, now feeling a little more uneasy. Chris is already googling to find out if there is a way to tell. He finds a YouTube video showing to pick them up by their neck and something about their feet and starts heading toward the garage. So I run and block him. “Those are MY chicken babies – you are not picking them up by their necks – stay away.” He must have known I meant business so he went and sat back down.
So I am googling a couple things. I go back and read a message from Rachel that says, “Oh, I see you got a straight run! You’ll have a couple of roos in there! I can’t wait to see what you get.” Ahhh… now her text makes sense. Oh dear lord! What if I have 6 roosters and two hens? Chris makes a gesture of chopping off their necks. So he gets a whack. So we are all sitting in silence googling away.
I burst out laughing. Laughing so hard tears roll down my cheeks and my belly hurts. It had been a rough day, so it felt SO good to laugh that hard.
My daughter Grace comes downstairs and asks what all the “racket” is. Chris says, “turns out we may have boy chickens and girl chickens”. “WHAT?!, Mom… I thought you ordered all girls??” Haha… no. No… I didn’t.
As it stands, I won’t find out the sex of my eight little chicken babies for a couple months. Just enough time to get attached to them, although I’m already very attached to the little fluff balls. They all have girl names so we will cross our fingers and hope that they don’t have to be trans-hens. Not that I’m against trans-hens. I just don’t want to have to deal with roosters!
So here it is for you in plain English just in case you’re thinking of becoming a crazy chicken lady as well. When those little eggs are incubating. They can be boy chicks or girl chicks. That is what a straight run is called. You get what you get and you don’t know until you know. That… was not made clear on any website I googled or pinned. Lets just hope that Rosé, Gloria, Sandy, Merigold, Daisy, Ash, Lola and Cocoa all have girl bits!
