Chicken Dance Peter B. Steiger 06/03/04 It always starts with the seemingly innocent question - "Honey, can we go out to eat tonight?"; "Honey, can I have some chicks for my birthday?"; "Honey, can we get a new house for our anniversary?" I agree to the request, being the beneficent king of my castle, and no sooner than I stamp my signet ring on the order do I start to regret the decision. Sure, she said she would feed her chicks every day and play with them and they would never make noise or make a mess of the house; besides it would only be a half-dozen or so and they're just a few dollars so what harm could it do? By the time they're grown we will have a world-class chicken coop outside for them complete with air conditioning, cable TV, and little exercise wheels for them. How could I say no to a simple little request like that, when my wife is looking at me with her patented sad puppy eyes? Besides, I figured it would be worth a few bucks to see the look on her face when it came time to rip the intestines out of those feathery bodies to make chicken dinner. True to her word, Sylvia only bought a six chick mix (thank you, Theodore Seuss Geisel)... the first time. But, like the caffeine addict who has to stop at Starbuck's just one more time on the way to work, she kept going back, and bringing home a few more chicks each time. Before I knew it, my castle had been overrun by a horde of 20 chirping balls of fuzz that leave far less cute balls of something else every 19 seconds. The kids discovered this trait in a hurry when they posed for some pictures of the birds sitting on the kids' heads. We got a picture of the smiles; we should have also gotten a picture of the look of horror and disgust that followed. Still, they were cute little things, and didn't take up much space. Sylvia put them in one of the boxes we used for moving, and each day moved them between boxes so she could change the wood shavings on their floor. She was doing such a great job I didn't even notice that her box collection included the box I was going to use to ship a broken computer back to my employer. That box is now now far too... aromatic to use for shipping anything. After a week or two, though, they outgrew their cardboard boxes and had moved to an expensive new plastic bin. They were still mostly fuzzy, but some of them were sprouting feathers and their frequent little surprises on the floor of their bin (and the kids' hands) were no longer so little. I had hardly finished counting up how much these "free" eggs were going to cost me before they had outgrown the plastic bin and we really, REALLY needed to get them out of the house and into an outdoor home. When my wife plans to do something, she doesn't just throw together any old parts and whip something up quick-and-dirty; she reads five million pages on the subject, spends 80 hours a day working out the details on her computer, and buys up every possible tool and part she might need to complete the project three times over. So the next thing I knew, we were buying ten thousand dollars worth of lumber and tools from Chicken Coop Depot for the chicken equivalent of Trump Towers. I was of two minds on this. On the one hand, part of me wants to spend the money on things like food, specifically Diet Coke and pizza; on the other hand if we don't get this herd of clucking monsters out of my house there's going to be bloodshed faster than you can say "Buffalo Wings." Unfortunately, this elaborate plan for a Hen Hilton meant we could not just whip something together in a few hours; instead we had to plan several days worth of construction. So of course our 5-year drought ended and the heavens opened up from that point forward - rain, hail, even snow the last week of May! As a stopgap solution Sylvia went where everyone goes for a larger indoor chicken coop, the children's resale shop. She came home with a playpen big enough to give those birds some room to stretch their feathers, but still they grow and grow; this week we have to be careful tiptoeing around their playpen for fear we'll disturb them, which results in an ear-shattering chorus of mixed chirps and clucks (their voices are changing) and a huge cloud of feathers that billows up when they start moving around. Speaking of bloodshed, we did have to cull the herd a bit when we discovered three vampire chickens among them. For a scary few days we kept finding fresh blood and open wounds on the backs of several of the hens, and managed to catch three of them in the act of pecking at their sisters. Those three were banished to the old plastic toy bin that was their former home, and we sent them off to a foster home in the form of some fellow homeschoolers who don't mind the extra work it will take to stop bloodthirsty killer chickens from tearing each other to bits. We did manage to get a "daytime only" pen up made of a flimsy frame surrounded by - who would have thought, chicken wire of all things. There is no protection from predators, so we can't leave them outside overnight, but first thing in the morning the kids load up the former chicken bin - the one before the playpen - and haul our herd out to the yard, where our Border Collie-and-who-knows-what mutt paces around the fence with a fanatical intensity. She has waited her whole life to put her herding instincts to use, so she's ready to pounce the moment one of her charges sneaks too close to the edge of the fence. This explains why I went out yesterday for lunch to find the dog watching the chickens and my wife and kids watching the dog with equal intensity. Since at that point I was watching them watch the dog watch the chickens, I figured it was only a matter of time before the chickens decided to watch me and complete the circle. Make mine extra crispy.