I have wanted to get chickens since we moved up here, since I started this blog. Aidan was two and a half.

The barn that we first lived in featured a small chicken coop out back, up the hill. The owner and his boyfriend who had lived there before us had some fancy show birds, but when we got there the birds were gone and the chicken coop seemed to me an impossibly dilapidated thing for something to spend a winter in.

We could have gotten chickens then, but the plan was to only be there for six months. Part of the torture of that time was having those six months stretch to a year and a half without our consent or foreknowlege.

At some point at that time, Aidan absorbed my desire to have chickens. We would talk about it playfully sometimes - he didn't talk much then, but he would light up with excitement.

Last month, we passed the local feed store and I read the sign to Aidan, "NOW TAKING CHICK ORDERS FOR SPRING".

We talked about getting chickens almost daily, but Steve would need to build a coop and every time we mentioned it to him he would be pained: our house is a construction site with half of the first floor gutted to the studs. It would be ridiculous for him to put his energy toward building a chicken house when we didn't have a proper house for ourselves.

Six year olds children are much more persistent and determined creatures than thirty-two year old moms. This particular six year old, though obviously bright and capable, has been scared of the prospect of having to learn to read and write. His progress in this area was beginning to worry us.

Steve finally said to Aidan, as he was getting ready to leave the house for four hours of drum lessons, that he could get chicks if he could read and write the word "chicken".

Then he left me with the cries and fits of a child who is hopelessly frustrated. I tried to explain to him over and over agian that his pop woudn't have given him a task like that if he didn't think he could do it - that it wouldn't be that hard - that I would help him. He screamed and flailed for three hours.

Finally, still sobbing, he came to me on the sofa and asked me to help him. We sounded out the word "chicken" and discovered that it was one of those blessed words where the letters actually made the sounds they were supposed to.

Steve had once told him that he could learn how to write words by writing them over and over again. He told me that that was what he would do and within about ten minutes I was quizzing him and he could do it. When Steve walked in the door that night, the first thing Aidan said to him was, "C-H-I-C-K-E-N".

Now we have ten chicks in a plywood brooder that Steve made. Turns out our gutted kitchen is the perfect place for them.