It is full force Spring in Schenanigansland, and I for one am loving it! My sinuses, not so much, but the more drugs the merrier if it keeps me digging in the dirt. Last year for Mother’s Day I bought myself 100 tulip bulbs online (they were my wedding flower). They came in the mail just before Fall, and I planted them right away. I had been looking forward to seeing them bloom all winter, and I was not disappointed. I adore natural beauty, and for once certain portions of my yard were simply gorgeous! Now, the rest of it was still strewn with toys, swords, light sabers and a half dozen abandon forts, but my flower beds were fantastic.

• 

But even the tulips weren’t my favorite part of Spring. Nope, my favorite part of Spring is all the new babies, in particular the baby chickens! Each year I try to wrangle some spare space in my chicken coop to accommodate a few more fluffy booties. It’s good to have a multi-generational flock so that as older hens stop laying younger ones are just beginning and will pick up the slack on production. I, for one love, nothing more then buying new chicks. Back before Covid, I would spend hours pouring over various hatchery websites. Comparing birds, prices, shipping costs, and seeing how many of my friends are interested in ordering with me to split those shipping costs. I’d order long before those eggs were hatched, eagerly awaiting the ship date and the call from post office. The postal workers always seemed to take forever finding my box in the back, then walking it up to the counter. Each year my breath would catch as I saw the box and strained to hear the cheeping inside. Each year I worried I’d get a box with no cheeping, it’d gotten too cold, or too hot, or took too long to get here. But thankfully, each year so far the chicks have been nothing short of a ruckus in the post office, just the way they ought to be.

Covid has changed a lot of things, and ordering my chicks was one of them. I didn’t trust the postal service this year. I just knew this would be the year of the silent box. There were too many variables: sick employees, shortages of workers, delayed mail, for me to risk an entire order of peeps. Instead, I organized Chick Day with my neighbors. I’ve managed to spread my joy of chickens to a few other ladies in the neighborhood, and we decided to all go to Tractor Supply and a local pet shop together early one Saturday morning. We bonded over selecting just the right birds and purchasing our future flocks. A tradition had been born!

But also in Spring time comes…FAMILY DODGE BALL TIME!!! The season in which the Schenanigans family can be found on the front lawn after dinner, using our children as meat shields and making a full contact sport out of a rubber dinosaur ball bought at the grocery store. The kids love it! The neighbors wave as they walk their nice, normal dogs, out on quiet evening strolls. Not one other family can be seen playing Family Dodge Ball in our neighborhood. Truthfully, probably in the County. But that’s entirely their loss. The fact that we live at the top of a hill with no sidewalks, and a crumbling asphalt street only adds a special flavor to the game.

Truth be told, I certainly hope my kids file these days away in their memories to last a lifetime. I know I’m out of shape, and we look like lunatics out there bopping around on the front lawn, flaring up my bursitis. But we laugh so hard, and the time goes by so fast with these little ones. I try to savor each day. Working full time has stolen a lot of my time and energy, bumping up against moments with my kids. But I take what I can and hope for the best. And right now our kids think hurling a dinosaur ball at them as hard as we can is the best that there is!