This week I got snookered into taking some chicks home for the weekend. These two chicks are the sole survivors of at least a dozen eggs that Roan's kindergarten class brought home from a field trip to a farm in Queens. Roan's teacher approached me at pick up, saying how excited Roan would be to take care of them over the weekend. She must have noticed the look on my face, because she said something about what an honor it is to host the chicks, and that all the kids want to be chosen for it. I must have still been giving her a pretty dirty look, because she leaned in to whisper, "better to take them now, while they're still small and they can't fly."
It's been a crazy week at work, with BEA in town, and the last thing I want to do over the weekend is add to the number of dependents I have to take care of. But when I complained to Jay about the chicks he was non-chalante. "It's no big deal," he said, "I know those chicks." Which is a line that I found (and still find) hilariously funny. He met the chicks on Memorial Day, when they stayed with a neighbor unfortunate enough to have to board them during a 3 day weekend.
These chicks are pooping machines. I have never seen animals that poop so much. Seriously, every 2 or 3 minutes one takes a dump. When they poop they squat down and flap their wings. And voila. They poop in their water dish, they poop in their food. They peck at each others' poop and get all agitated. I'm typing this from our office, where we are boarding the chicks, and the whole room smells like a mix of their food and their shit, because even though we clean their box twice a day, they poop so much that it's always filthy.
They poop so much that they are plagued by a problem called "pasty butt." It's when their poop gets stuck in their fuzz and hardens, and blocks other poop from coming out. It's a serious condition that can kill them. It kills them very quickly, because like I said, they never stop pooping. So you have to be vigilant. On Friday night, Jay noticed that one chick had Pasty Butt. I will not detail all the steps we had to take to save this poor baby chick from a dishonorable death by poop, but I will say that it involved at least half an hour of both Jay and my attentions, Q-tips, olive oil, nail scissors, and an extremely feisty chick.
We are determined: these chicks cannot die on our watch. I cannot face the disappointment and tears of 27 kindergarten students. We must do our part to fight against Pasty Butt.
We must also MacGyver the other problems that arise with these chicks. Such as, one of them escaped their box today. We only knew because the chick who was left behind raised such a ruckus. So we built a new home for the chicks, out of a Diapers.com box. It has higher walls. Also, the chicks love to poop in their water dish, and then, once their poop is adequately dissolved and evenly dispersed, they flip their water dish over, flinging poop water all over the floor and walls. This can't be good for them.
Roan built the chicks this castle, so they could come out of their cage and poop all over our floor. They seemed to like it, until Lani sat down too close to the castle and the wall collapsed on them. It was terrible, for a moment I thought one chick had broken its leg. But they seem fine, though I thought they acted anxious when we put them back inside the rebuilt castle. Guess what they do when they are anxious? They poop even more than usual.
In honor of the chicks, Roan decided to make a book and write a story about them. The title of the book is "I Love Chicks." It's about chicks that are race cars, spies, and bad guys. When I asked Roan how he learned to spell the word "chicks" so perfectly he said, "Mommy, that's what I go to school for."
We cannot wait for tomorrow, when these chicks go back to school.
