Pascal.

On May 21st, I picked up Eva and her buddy Logan from school on one of their last kindergarten days and Logan's teacher asked us if we could take a chick home with us. I don’t know why that appealed to me but I didn’t even give it a second thought. I just looked at Eva’s beaming little face and said yes. In the car on the way home Eva named the chick Pascal. If you have seen Tangled as many times as she has you totally get that. Rapunzel’s pet chameleon was called Pascal and perfectly fresh on Eva’s brain. So we get Pascal home and this little chick immediately casts its spell on us; charmed us all into loving it!

My other three kids were in shock at first. They had lots of questions like: “Ma, you let us have a chick?” and “we really get to keep this chick?” It came home with us in a shoe box and a baggie with a small amount of feed and because I could think of nothing else, I emptied out a plastic Rubbermaid tub and that became Pascal’s new home. I swiped some of Emily’s hamster bedding and Pascal even had a nest! The next day Sarah and I went to Tractor Supply and picked up a 25 pound bag of chick feed and a bag of pine shavings that was bigger than Sarah. He sleeps and rests during the day a little bit in the tub but mostly ranges free around one corner of our backyard.

None of us knows much about chickens but we’re learning. The kids love this animal, it’s a good natured, incredibly low maintenance creature and it bravely puts up with their need to handle it every once in a while. It still peeps like it did when we first brought it home, though now not as often. At first, Pascal would walk right over to me and sit on my feet. Yes, occasionally pooping on my feet but what do you expect, it's a chicken. Once when we were fussing about the droppings Eva said “we could potty train that chicken!” It’s not so bad though because now he stays in the corner of our yard that is like a jungle most of the day, he hunts lots of bugs over there. Oh, and the bugs! When the kids noticed that Pascal would eat any bug or spider they started bringing him snacks! He doesn’t really need their help though; Pascal is a good little forager and gets the rest from the dog bowls we use for his feed and water. The day I bought the dog bowls at Target I saw a bag of dog food that advertised its “real chicken flavor” and I was appalled for a few seconds until I remembered that we eat chicken too!

At night we bring his tub over by the back door for the night and cover it with this wooden frame/chicken wire thing that Tony made a few years ago to sift and clean rocks and gravel. Every night at dusk Pascal comes over to the back door and sits on that thing and waits for us to bring the tub back over from the jungle. Then he gets in his tub/nest and settles in for the night. It’s really a wonderful bird and an awesome pet. We’d like to build Pascal a real chicken house but we are waiting to see if it turns out to be a hen or a rooster, at this point we still can’t tell. I’m hoping for the hen because I want eggs and because I think a cock-a-doodle do every morning may not work for our neighbors. So if Pascal is a rooster I’m not sure what we’ll do. It’ll be hard to part with him and we wouldn’t even consider eating him because he’s our pet and it wouldn’t be right to eat your pet. I keep trying to say "it" instead of him, but it’s hard to do that when I want sweet Pascalita to be a girl.

In either case, I think we're hooked. There will definitely be many more chicks in our future.