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!”
Boy, did I speak too soon. I have teenagers now. One of my kids brought home a sandwich maker and a mini fridge, and another brought home a milchig George Foreman and a set of linens that has never seen the inside of a washing machine. And that was just the boys. Here’s what my daughter brought home:
I may have mentioned at some point that my daughter is an assistant preschool morah. This means that she’s not in charge of coming up with lesson plans, but she does have a pretty big hand in keeping things running smoothly in school itself, making sure that for example the kids are returned to their parents at the end of the day in roughly the same shape as they were in the morning. And she has to do the same with the classroom, which includes for example feeding the goldfish.
Every year, when the class gets up to daled, they buy a dag, which everyone thinks is very clever, but really, every animal starts with a letter. And this is the only one they get. There is no dov or ari… They only get the animals that are easy to take care of.
And yes, they buy a new fish every year. The idea is that the fish die, usually around the letter mem, and it becomes a whole other lesson.
But my daughter didn’t know that, 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!” Not like, “Thanks for keeping all the kids alive!” So my daughter had to bring it home.
That said, this fish isn’t really ours. She’s supposed to bring it back next year, in time for daled. So we have to keep it alive, which seems pretty simple. Not that I haven’t accidentally killed fish. But I think it will be okay. As long as we don’t completely forget about it.
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 tarnegoles? – but probably because they are 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.
Things like this are the reason they don’t do bears.
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 keeping the fish alive, and it will give the kids something to do other than bug me that they’re bored.
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 are not expecting back.
Will it stay in the bin? Well, it is a bird. So eventually no. But at first, I guess it will, before it learns to look up and realize there is literally nothing keeping it in.
Yes, it will grow eventually, 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.”
We can definitely have it for a short while, at least. This would not be our first temporary pet. 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.
And then, when Shabbos or Yom Tov is over, I get to do heavy 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. I don’t know. I haven’t gotten up to that part of the research.
Overall, it’s adorable and fun to hold and watch it move around, and in exchange for our hospitality, it leaves us – for lack of a better word – presents. Presents everywhere, every two minutes, rain or shine! Usually rain. And not the kind of presents we were hoping to get from a chicken. And I believe that sonei matanos yichyeh. And this is doubly great, because 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 will not 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 lives on a farm and said, “We have a chick!” and his friend was not impressed. But he asked my son, “Wait, 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 asked us, “Should I go to my friend and get another chicken?”
Wait, the chick gets a buddy just because he won’t stop asking for it? My kids spent their entire childhood asking for sleepovers. “Can I have a sleepover?” “Can I have a sleepover?” Maybe there’s an underlying reason; let’s call a child psychologist!
“Oh, he’s lonely. He wants a friend.”
Thank you.
So we put a mirror in the bin with it, so it could think it has a friend. And my son said, “That’s even sadder!” So he immediately went out the next day and got it a buddy.
The next day was Friday. I didn’t have time to schlep out there on a Friday, but B”H my son has a license, and as he said last year, when he was begging us to let him get the license, “I’m going to do errands for you!” And the errand he did this week was pick up a chicken. See, we couldn’t even imagine at the time the errands he would do for us. Even if we pictured chicken, we wouldn’t have pictured live chicken.
Anyway, my son comes home with a chick that his friend claims is one week older, and it’s like three times the size of the original chicken. You know how there’s a disconnect where newborn chicks don’t actually look like chickens? They’re cute and they have fur, and they don’t have that weird red thing whose name I have yet to look up… 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.” And like I said, these things always happen on Friday. So whatever.
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.”
I mean imagine you have a baby, and you’ve just brought it home from the hospital yesterday, and you haven’t childproofed the house yet, but you’re thinking, “I don’t need to childproof yet, because even though I have not yet read up on babies, right now it seems like it pretty much stays in its little bin thing.” And then the next day somebody comes along – someone with 30 kids -- 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’?” We wouldn’t say “goldfish.” We would say, “Gefilte fish!” And he’d say, “What is that?” And we’d say, “We don’t know either!”
Shoot! I forgot we have a goldfish! Has anyone remembered to feed it?
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia, a monthly humor columnist, and has written six books, all published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send any questions, comments, or ideas to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
