With a chick, chick here — but not in our house

EDITOR’S NOTE: I’ll get you all back to Panama City Beach next week — don’t complain, that’s sooner than I’ll get back there.

We spent the week before Easter with 10 chicks hanging around in our dining room. No, they weren’t that kind of chicks — I’m not that lucky and my wife definitely wouldn’t stand for that.

No, these were the kind of chicks that grow up and lay eggs — the last being something I do every week when I write this column.

Ethan and his wife recently bought a new home, a place out in the country on about five acres that came with several outbuildings, including a small barn, a smokehouse and a chicken coop.

That led Terry to decide that Ty and Nolan, our grandsons, needed baby chicks for Easter.

Apparently, this was some sort of tradition in her family when she was growing up.

In my family, living in town and with five kids, a dog and a cat — along with other occasional pets — in the house, my parents figured chickens were not needed to add to the madhouse. The result was the only chicks we ever got for Easter were the marshmallow kind — which was just fine with me.

Fortunately, when we were raising our family, we lived in cities that had ordinances prohibiting the keeping of live poultry within the city limits.

I had nothing to do with any of those ordinances being adopted — they were in place long before we moved there, but I heartily applauded the foresight, wisdom and perspicacity of those city fathers of long ago who put them in place.

Terry, however, received chicks one year for Easter and never forgot it — perhaps because her parents had to send the chicks out of town to live with her cousins who had a farm after running afoul — or would that be a-fowl? — of local ordinances where they lived.

So it was that she decided to relive that part of her childhood through her grandsons and set out looking to find some chicks to purchase.

It’s not exactly the kind of thing you’d find in the local supermarket, or even in the pet department of the local department store, but she finally did find a half dozen — three of them yellow and three black.

Since this was more than a few days before Easter, we had to keep them in the house for a few days. We dragged an old oversized aquarium into the living room, put an old towel on the bottom and put the chicks in their with a watering bottle and some chicken feed — which, by the way, is not what they cost.

A few days later, she got four more multi-colored chicks, which went in a separate cage, being a little bit older than single-colored compatriots.

Terry got a book on chicks from a friend with a hobby farm and was soon figuring out what breeds she had and what they were good for. Of course, what I thought they were good would take a while — and a lot of chicken feed, literally and figuratively.

Terry had made sure to clear all of this with Ethan and Sharon ahead of time, so they at least knew what was coming, though Ty and Nolan didn’t.

We loaded the cages into the back of the pickup truck Easter morning and hauled them out to the Chicken Ranch — make that Ethan and Sharon’s place.

After we had given the grandsons — including Aiden, who came for the holiday with his parents, Alex and Julia — their Easter baskets, we told them we had another surprise for them in the back of the truck.

Although the chicks hadn’t stopped peeping since we’d first brought them home — I swear they slept in shifts so at least one of them was always awake and peeping — all three of the boys were speechless when they got their first glance of the chicks.

That didn’t last long, though, as Ty quickly directed the adults as we moved the chicks to their new home.

I suggested we should name the new chicks, but nobody like my suggested names — Original, Extra Crispy, Barbecue, Nuggets, Fingers, Popcorn, Filet, Patty, and, for the two foreign-looking ones, Cacciatore and Parmesan.

We had trouble keeping Ty out of the chicken coop the rest of the day. It seems he had to keep checking on their welfare, make sure they were doing all right and acclimating themselves to their new home.

We did have it confirmed for us that our oldest grandson can count to 10, as he made sure to count all the chicks every time he went in the coop the rest of the afternoon. Who knew farming could also be an arithmetic lesson as well?

I don’t know if Ty spent the night in the chicken coop with his newest pets, although I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.

We did find out why Ethan was so agreeable to the whole chicks for Easter thing when he took off Monday morning for a two-week Army class at Camp Shelby, Miss.

If he’d taken the chicks with him, we could have had Barbecue naturally, not to mention Southern Fried. At the very least, they could have been laying hard-boiled eggs.