Trendy or trend-setter?

One of our neighbors heard us hammering the other day and came over to see what we were building. We told him about our new chicks and he scoffed, "Chickens! You and everybody else in Buckhead has chickens nows." Really? Are we (horrors) trendy? Granted a number of our friends have brought little flocks home recently or are planning to get chickens. But why is that unusual?  We seem to be one of the few cultures that doesn't have chickens roaming around. When we visited my brother in Greece, we woke up with the sound of chickens. In the Bahamas, chickens. A friend from Kenya says he had a hard time acclimating to the silence of this country because there were no chickens.  People we know from Mexico, Ecuador, France, and Jamaica all think having chickens is a normal part of life.  You raise the chicks and eat the roosters for Christmas dinner. Well, we won't be eating our roosters for dinner because we are softies but for many other parts of the world, this is an expected cycle of life. 



Cinnamon and Fuzzball- our Mille Fleur Bantams



Midnight and 2 of our black Penedesencas

Bringing these little creatures home has been such an unexpected joy! Unexpected in many ways- first, they were only 2 weeks old when they joined us. I thought they were going to be 4 or 5 weeks old.  Not that it really matters except that 2 week old chicks don't have feathers yet and have to stay inside under a heat lamp. And we have cats. 

Second, these little chicks are growing so fast and have really endeared themselves to us.  When the chicks were inside, each of our children would wake up and immediately want to play with the chicks. Now that they are outside, the kids love wandering behind them and watching them. Or scooping them up and carrying them around to play.

In the last month, we found a previous owner of our house who lived here in the 1950s.  He said they had a chicken coop with 70+ chickens. So we aren't trendy after all! We're just getting back to the roots of our house.