I got both.

Okay, so remember how a few years ago I wrote about how kids bring the most random things home at the end of the school year that you then have to figure out how to store?

“Here are 17 yellow markers and half a siddur!”

Well, my daughter brought home live animals.

I may have mentioned at some point that my daughter is an assistant preschool morah. And every year, when the class gets up to daled, they buy a דג, which everyone thinks is very clever, and then the fish dies, usually around the letter mem, and it becomes a whole other lesson.

But my daughter didn’t know it was supposed to die, apparently, so she kept feeding it. And then the end of the year came, and it was still alive, and the hanhalah said, “We can reuse this fish next year!” But that would mean that someone had to take it home for the summer, and the main teacher said, “Never in all my years teaching here has the fish still been alive at the end of the year. This is all your fault!” So my daughter had to bring it home.

But that wasn’t the only thing my daughter brought home from kindergarten on the Thursday after school. She also brought home a chick. Basically, her preschool department gets a batch of eggs toward the end of the year, and then some of them hatch. The school times it so that the chickens hatch around the last week of the year—maybe for תרנגולת?—but probably because they’re not equipped to deal with chicks, as is evidenced by how surprised they are when a fish makes it to the end of the year. They’re equipped to deal with eggs. Just barely. Only one egg hatched this year, and the prevailing theory is that it’s because someone accidentally unplugged the incubator.

Anyway, my daughter was offered the chick, because of her track record for keeping things alive, and said, “Sure, why not?” because we don’t really have any heavy summer plans, other than remembering to feed the fish.

The chick came into the world with supplies, I’m assuming. At least it came into our house with supplies. There’s the huge storage bin that it lives in, and a water dish and a heat lamp. And a bag of chicken feed that I hope they’re not expecting back.

Will it stay in the bin? Well, it is a bird. So eventually no. But we’re not sure how long we’re keeping this chick. The plan is to see how it goes, and by “how it goes” I mean “what my wife says.”

That said, I don’t know the first thing about raising chicks. My kids love springing new pets on me on a Thursday or a Friday, when I have no time to look up how to deal with them, and I kind of have to hope they stay alive over Shabbos, until I can do research into how to raise my one chicken, like all these destitute families did for thousands of years in Poland or Italy or wherever chickens are from.

Overall, it’s adorable and fun to hold, and in exchange for our hospitality, it leaves us—for lack of a better word—presents. And I believe that sonei matanos yichyeh. Especially since, as you might know if you’ve been following my articles, we just recently got a carpet and two new couches in that same room. Because we’re getting ready for shidduchim, and first up is this daughter who brought home the chick.

Let’s see how fast the mechutanim run.

The chicken can run. And it won’t stop making noise. It falls asleep for about a minute, and then wakes up suddenly, like, “What was I doing again? Oh, right. Making noise.”

So my son called his friend who runs a farm and said, “We have a chick!” and his friend said, “You have one chick? Is it making a lot of noise?” And my son said, “Yes!” And his friend said, “Yeah, it’s gonna do that. Chicks don’t like being alone.”

So my son went to the farm the next day (Friday) and came home with another chick that his friend claims is one week older, but it’s like 3 times the size of the original chicken. You know how there’s a disconnect where newborn chicks don’t actually look like chickens? Well, this one looks like a chicken, only maybe a bit smaller. Basically, this thing is like a teenager. The entire Friday afternoon, all it did was eat. And spill food all over the place. Like a tiny yeshiva bochur.

We asked, “Are you sure this bird is small enough to live in the bin too?” And my son’s friend said, “Yeah, yeah, it’s fine.”

Anyway, Friday night during the seudah, we suddenly hear a noise, and the bird shows up in the dining room, during the main course, like, “So what’s everybody eating? Smells good!”

“Um… None of your business. Stay in the living room.”

Imagine you have a baby, and you’ve just brought it home from the hospital yesterday, and you haven’t child proofed the house yet, but you’re thinking, “I don’t need to child proof yet, because right now it seems like it pretty much stays in its little bin thing.” And then the next day somebody comes along and says, “It’s better for kids to have siblings! So here’s a five-year-old! Take one of mine!”

This chicken basically imprinted on my son, and started following him around, jumping around and taking in the scenery, like, “Hey, is this a new couch?”

“No! Get off the couch!”

And meanwhile the little chick in the bin is back to chirping.

“Where’d you go? Wait, we can leave?”

The whole situation was a little bit awkward, because this is the first type of animal we’ve had in our house that we could actually eat. I mean technically we can eat a goldfish, but we don’t actually eat goldfish. Like if a goldfish jumped out of his bowl during the Shabbos seudah and said, “Hey, whatcha eatin’?” then…

Shoot! I forgot we have a goldfish! Has anyone remembered to feed it?

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia and other magazines. He has also published eight books and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected].