When people ask me, “Mordechai, is there a good pet I can get that will actually give me something in return, but not nearly as much as I put into it?” I recommend chickens. Or cows, but I live in a smallish house. So chickens. Though I did finally move them outside.

To refresh your memory, several months ago our daughter brought home a chick from kindergarten, which is the kind of thing we would normally contact the principal about except that our daughter teaches kindergarten. And then our son brought home a second chick from his friend’s farm, because the way parenting works is that when one kid has something, the next kid wants it too.

But see, the fun of having indoor chickens is that they always give you something to do, which sounds great unless you also work indoors. Because they don’t stay in their bin. The first week we got them, the bigger chicken jumped out and wandered into the dining room during our Shabbos seudah. (“So… What’s everybody eating?”)

When you have chickens in your living area, you always have to watch where you step. And not because you might step on them. They will not let that happen. There are other things they leave around that you might step on. We try to be ever vigilant and are wiping the floor constantly but, for example, my wife for the past few months has been in middle of a contact lens trial regimen, in which she, in conjunction with her eye doctor, is trying to see which lenses work for her, and which ones do not allow her to see the presents the chickens leave on the floor that are the same color as the hardwood.

Whichever contacts she settles on are going to be amazing.

I also don’t know when the chickens actually sleep. Every time I think they’re sleeping, I squint a bit to investigate, and they immediately open their eyes.

For the first few weeks, I had to have a heat lamp on them constantly until their feathers grew in. And the thing about heat lamps is that they give off light too, so the chickens always think it’s day. They never sleep. And some nights, well after midnight, they would still be hopping out of the bin and jumping onto the back of my chair not knowing what to do with themselves.

After midnight is when I work! That’s when the kids go to bed!

So we figure that maybe they’ll actually sleep if they’re outside, where there’s a gradual sundown—usually about the same time as the day before. Though it has to be noisier to sleep outside. I know this because of Sukkos. And July 4th.

Step one was to build a coop. Baruch Hashem, we have a son who’s a budding contractor. Yes, the one who has a friend who’s a farmer. It’s a very blue-collar class of kids who want to see how far they can get in life with a minimum of reading.

(HOW IT’S GOING: He has more disposable income than I do.)

So our son built a whole gesheft, with ramps and wood chips and a loft for sleeping that will also be convenient for us to collect the eggs from, assuming the chickens know we expect them to lay their eggs there. No raccoons are getting into this thing.

I would say that the biggest question we get, whenever we tell people that we moved our chickens outside, is, “What do you do about the cold?”

So I don’t know if you know this, but chickens are farm animals, and farm animals live outside. In the wild, chickens don’t fly south for the winter. Chickens do not travel. They cross one road and everyone makes a huge deal. And they’re literally made out of winter coats.

What they do need is wind blocks. Whichever direction the wind is coming from, they need some kind of nook they can hide behind, because however they have their feathers puffed out to keep them warm, the wind blows their feathers around. So the coop has to have areas that aren’t drafty. I don’t think our house has areas that aren’t drafty. It’s a good thing they moved out.

For the most part, though, they are thrilled to be outside. The main downside for the chickens is that for the first couple of weeks at least, every single day when the sun started going down, they went into this panic, like, “What are we supposed to do, again? Where do we go?” I’ve shown them. And they run back and forth and look for a way out and look for us to take them in before it gets too dark for them to see anything and they call out to us…

Anyway, we’ve finally gotten to a point where they usually remember that they’re supposed to head upstairs, but they’ll go up at the wrong times. Like if I come out to give them supper a little early, or it’s rainy outside, they’ll go up and sit on a perch waiting for night to come, and then after a while, they’ll come back down, feeling all embarrassed, like “Sorry. We jumped the gun.” And the other one will go, “I only went up because she went up.”

So now I’m thinking that we should post a sign in the coop with all the zmanim on it—shkiyah, neitz—that they can check 500 times a day.

But having chickens outside has changed me in some weird ways. I am now always aware of what the temperature is on any given day, what time it’s going to rain, and which direction the wind is blowing from. Normally, for my daily life I don’t really care which way the wind is coming from. My wife says, “It’s windy outside,” and I say, “Really? From which direction?”

I’ve also discovered a side of me wherein I enjoy constantly making smallish home improvements to the coop that my son didn’t think about. I’m constantly adding hooks and wind blocks and nesting boxes, and you can’t really do that to your house, because every time you make an addition to your house, you also have to finish the walls nicely when you’re done so your wife doesn’t yell at you. But I make improvements to the coop, and my wife does not care.

Point is: Though I’ve moved the chickens outside, I’m still not getting any work done.

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].