Ever since our kids came home with chickens, everyone we tell wants to know if they’re boys or girls. Like it really matters. I’ll tell you like this: I’ve had numerous animals in my house over the years—kittens, snakes, parakeets, a hamster, various fish… I don’t think I’ve ever known if any of them were boys or girls. We actually have a fish right now, as I write this. No idea what gender it is.

With chickens, gender kind of matters, though, because if you have a girl, you might have eggs every morning, whereas if you have a boy, you might have angry neighbors every morning.

You know how I once wrote an article about how at the end of the school year, your kids will bring home all kinds of things that you’ll have to figure out how to store? Well, apparently, if your kid is a preschool teacher, she’ll bring home animals. My daughter brought home a chick. And apparently, the one she brought home was defective, because it would not stop chirping. So my son called his friend, who runs a farm, and asked, “How do you get chicks to stop chirping?” like maybe we could take out the batteries. And his friend said that chickens are social animals, and it would not stop chirping because it needs a friend. So my son went to the farm and picked up another chick that is about a week or two older.

Anyway, we might not know their genders for a while. Apparently, the average chicken doesn’t lay eggs until it’s about 16-24 weeks old. Which sounds like a long time, until you realize that my daughter didn’t get a job until she was 18. And she keeps the money. Whereas with a chicken, we get the eggs! That’s what sold my wife on this, I think. Do you know what eggs cost these days? You can get free eggs, just for the price of feed and bedding and grit and toys and a chicken coop!

I’ve been trying to figure out the genders, though, for the sake of the people who keep asking. But I think it will be a while. I don’t even know if the chickens know.

The other reason gender matters is that we have to come up with names. Gender should affect names, right?

Not really. Because #1, the chickens don’t even realize they have names. We give them names so we can talk to each other about them. It’s purely for lashon hara purposes. #2, the chickens won’t be offended if we give them names of the wrong gender. And #3, we can give them names that aren’t actual names and therefore don’t have a gender. Like there are no human beings I know named “Schnitzel,” for example. Except this one kid in camp.

Basically, what we decided was that the child who came home with each chicken gets to name it. But that hasn’t stopped the arguments: Schnitzel and Fire Popper, Corn Flake and Pretzel, Chalifasi and Temurasi, Smitchick and Boychick… The kids do not stop arguing about names.

See, this is why you don’t let your kids name each other.

In the meantime, I’m glad there’s a little one and a big one, because that way, while the kids figure this out, my wife and I can say, “The little one” and “The big one.” I don’t know what we’re going to call them if the little one gets bigger than the big one.

For now, though, my daughter named her chicken Yapchick, which sounds cute until you realize that there’s no actual chicken in yapchick. And my son named his Baby Mo after one of his cuter cousins whose parents once owned chickens. But those might just be the names for now.

“What if it survives to adulthood?” I asked. “Will we call it Adult Mo?”

“No,” my son said. “Baby’s his first name.”

“So his last name is Mo?”

So for now, the big one is Baby Mo. The name sort of befits it, though, because it has serious FOMO. I’ve already mentioned once how it feels the need to join us for Shabbos meals. Well, it also feels the need to pop out of the bin whenever we hold Yapchick, which is a lot, because Yapchick is cute. And then it walks around and does the constant chirping thing. So we have to hold this big guy too, every single time, even though it’s not as cute, so it doesn’t get a complex.

Oh, you know how they say that chickens can’t fly? That’s a lie. Or else what I have is not a chicken. I mean, if I don’t know how to figure out gender, there’s no way I know breeds. There are only two genders. The other day my son was holding Yapchick near where I was working, and Baby Mo popped of the bin and landed on my desk. (I’m getting a lot of work done these days.) But yeah, chickens can’t fly.

That said, we don’t really lock them in the bin most of the time, so we basically have free-range chickens. In our house. You know how when you go to the zoo, there are just some loose chickens wandering around, like, “Are these guys even aware this is a zoo?” That’s what our house is like. Every day, they have to explore the entire living room, pecking for food on my hardwood floor that I sweep a thousand times a day now.

“Is this food?”

“No, this is a present you left earlier. Stop pecking it.”

So now I’m checking constantly to make sure they’re still in the bin and not under the wheels of my desk chair. Because if you’re going to find food on the floor, it’s a pretty safe bet that’s where you’ll find it.

Anyway, that’s it for now. We’ll look in on the chickens in a few weeks, unless they end up under my chair. I will, of course, keep you posted on the gender thing as it develops, in case you’re trying to earn shadchanus.

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].