At the risk of making you suffer through yet another blog on chickens (my daughter tells me I write way too much about them), I do need to update you on two rather momentous events that occurred over the past month.

First, 2009  was a really bad year for Michael Jackson.  In early December as I was walking up Park Avenue with some girl friends, my cell phone rang. On the other end was my daughter who was exclaiming “Mom, guess what happened” over and over again.  She kept pushing me to guess and then told me Sam was crying.  At this point I was bordering on hysteria.  I finally found out that our singing rooster, Michael Jackson, who I had been diligently trying to find a new home for, was found dead in the coop by my oldest son David.  ”OMG, Michael Jackson died” – I blurted out to my friends. They looked at me with strange stares.  ”Anne, that was 6 months ago.”

Broken neck.  Unfortunate coop malfunction … or murder I mused?  The metal feeder, which hangs from the ceiling and is suspended off the floor by an inch or so, had been knocked down, presumably falling over on MJ, who must have been enjoying his evening meal.  It was all a rather odd circumstance – the irony that this would happen …. and the victim would be the noisy one.  In the first 24 hours I was convinced someone must have gone in there, but my son, who hasn’t developed my level of cynicism, disagreed.

Well whatever happened, another MJ left this world, and left three very sad boys behind, and I must admit a couple of sad parents.  Although we quickly adjusted to the ease of walking into the coop without worrying that a protective Lakenvelder rooster might attack.

So then began part 2 of the story.  David started bringing eggs in from the coop and placing them under a heat lamp, until he could borrow an incubator from a friend.  Apparently eggs can be fertile for up to five days after a rooster has been in the vicinity.  While the first few eggs under the heat lamp became hard boiled, he ended up with nine eggs in the incubator. All this happened with little discussion, no planning or thoughts about the implications of just what this might lead to.

I silently calculated the days to figure out when we might have a hatch (21 days) – December 31st. This meant figuring out how to get the incubator up to Vermont for our vacation after Christmas.  So there we left after Christmas – four kids, 2 snowboards, 4 pairs of skis, lots of gear and food, and one egg incubator plugged into the car lighter.

On December 30th, we woke up to a bird singing outside our bedroom window….or so we thought.  We quickly realized that we were hearing peeps coming from the incubator.  After a long, hard day, that chick finally hatched around 6PM.  David was pacing like a nervous father, trying to get everything set up properly.  Twenty-four hours later, five more had hatched. And guess what?  I think three of them are roosters.  Lord help me.

I won’t begin to bore you with my worries now – like, what the heck do we do with six more chickens?  It’s too cold for them to be outside for quite a while, we need to figure out if we need to build another coop, and what about the roosters?  (and if I couldn’t get rid of a beautiful rare Lakenvelder rooster, how do I ever get rid of rooster mutts?)!

Hell, I might as well throw in the towel and say yes to getting that dog now.  Bring on the chaos! (Please feel free to talk me out of this).