There is a chick living under my husband’s desk.

How it got there is a long story.

Two things happened a few of months ago: my brother-in-law asked if we wanted his friend’s silkie chickens (which turned out not to be the COVID pets she had been hoping for) and Samantha started collecting abandoned duck eggs from the pond, hoping she could get some of them to hatch. (Yes, they were truly abandoned. No nest raiding involved, I promise!)

We took the cute-in-a-scraggly-way teen-age silkies and added them to our flock. Urban homesteading at its best! Samantha started trying to engineer an incubator for the duck eggs.

When our neighbor heard about Samantha’s interest in ducks, she sent her husband up into the attic and then over to our house to deliver their old incubator. Weeks of anticipation followed.

We didn’t quite have the incubator figured out, so the duck experiment, sadly, ended up being nothing but a smelly mess and a lesson in partially-developed duckling anatomy. Samantha took it well and was very good about cleaning it all up. We considered where to store the incubator.

Meanwhile, we began to realize that two of the three silkie chickens were a little different. Bigger combs. A tendency to jump (like goombas, I kid you not) and fight. And finally, they crowed.

Our lovely hens were roosters.

This is an age-old tale, and we probably should have been more savvy. But just you wait, Henry Higgins, just you wait. It gets better.

I started looking for someone who would actually want silkie roosters, and was shocked to have quick success…but my friend wasn’t ready to take them just yet. So we waited, and hoped the neighbors didn’t mind the crowing too much.

Meanwhile, the roosters and hens did what roosters and hens will do: provided live Life Cycle lessons for anyone wandering through our backyard. So Samantha did some more research, and started absconding with our would-be breakfasts and starting them in the incubator.

The incubator is under my husband’s desk because, well, we have a small house. The footspace under the desk was (usually) unoccupied.

We ordered a new thermometer so the eggs would have a fighting chance. More weeks of anticipation. And Wednesday night, we started hearing peeping. Which, I now know, is what chicks do before they hatch.

Then we watched one of the eggs wiggle around for a while (it is really strange to watch). And right before breakfast today, while no one was looking, out the soggy little darling popped, to be rhapsodized by one and all. A black-and-gold Ameraucana/Silkie mix. I suggested naming him (Joseph) Pieper. I had to explain the joke to Samantha. (Given his coloring, maybe Drew Brees would be better…)

Samantha and her dad made a quick run for chick food and bedding, and she has spent the last two days fashioning a brooder out of detritus from the shed.

City dwellers that we are, we’re already at our legal limit for chickens, so the next project is finding someone interested in silkies, or Ameraucana/silkies, or Black Australorpe/silkies…you get the idea. This was not an organized breeding experiment. We’re holding out hope that the Ameraucana mix will lay tiny green eggs, but who knows!

(At this point in the writing, I had to take a break to watch chick #2 hatch.)

But as I was saying, none of this was planned. One little serendipity followed another, until we had a peeping, wriggling bunch of mutt chickens under my husband’s desk. I thought I had avoided this fate when we chose to live within the city limits…but Samantha has farming in her blood and she had other plans. We sat back and watched as she nurtured her little brood to life.

I’m sure Pieper and his new friend are grateful.

Update: In the time it took me to finish this post, two more chicks hatched. Craig’s desk is getting to be quite noisy.

Re-opening the blog attempt #…

yeah, I don’t know either.

The whole keeping-up-frequent-posts-with-no-home-internet thing is a bit of a drag.  It requires discipline.  Which I sometimes lack.

But here goes again, anyway.

I went to my first writer’s conference this weekend.  The Louisiana-Mississippi region of SCBWI held its first ever KidLit conference Saturday at Sacred Heart Academy in New Orleans.  It was lovely.

The take-away:  Write for yourself, revise for your readers.  Thank you, Cheryl Klein.  

We also got to meet Angie Thomas, four days after her debut novel The Hate U Give hit #1 on the NY Times bestseller list.  Needless to say, she was glowing.  Though I suspect that is usual for her.  She was definitely an inspiration.  Yes, I bought the book.  No, I haven’t read it yet.  Really have to finish Octavian Nothing Part II before I take on anything else.  And that may be a while.  

I also got to meet Carrel Muller, who is the lower school librarian at Sacred Heart.  I want my girls to go to school there so she can be their librarian.  She is lovely!  She convinced me I need to go back and fill in all the holes in my folklore and mythology education.  And read do the same with my kids.  She also read a piece of mine (in the First Look part of the program where they read and critique the openings of several submissions), and it was exactly as I would dream of a children’s librarian reading it to little ones.  So that was a very cool moment.  Now if I can just convince someone out there to publish it…

Right.  So on that note, I could use prayers for persistence – to keep showing up at the page, and to keep sending things out, despite the piles of rejections.  Blah.

For those of you who are here less for the minutiae of my writing life, and more for cute baby stories, the lovely children are well.  I’ve picked up two Latin classes at JPG in the mornings, so they are spending the mornings with a friend and coming home for lunch, naps, etc. in the afternoons.

Just through May.  If the headmaster asks, you can assure him I still do not want to come on full time next year.  This experience has been a good reminder of where I want to be.  Home.  Period.  Which, of course, includes the library and the park.  But mostly home.

I thought our chickens had stopped laying, but it turns out they laid all their eggs in the bushes for a while.  Under the blackberry brambles, to be precise.  We found 24 one day, and 7 the next.  We have three chickens.  Three eggs a day, at best.  So it was a jubilee.  They seem to have figured out the purpose of the nesting boxes again, though.  Which is easier, but less exciting.  You can’t have everything, I guess.

We planted some vegetables and flowers last weekend.  (Thanks to Fr. Sam for the seeds!  The wildflower bed is well on it’s way!)  Hopefully there will be pictures…when I get better at technology.  Maybe next spring.  
Book of the week: This Is Not My Hat by John Klassen.  Hilarious.  It should be used in film classes as a study in dramatic irony, and in writers’ workshops as and example of how the pictures and text work together.  No redundancy – each does its own part towards a flawlessly integrated whole.  And it’s soooo funny.

I hope that there will be more posts soon.   And that is not intended as ironic, but whether it is or not remains to be seen.