Raising Baby Chicks With Toddlers (A Warning)

I'm currently staring at a 100-litre plastic storage tub in my hallway that's emitting a continuous, high-pitched sound, much like a smoke alarm that has somehow developed a needy personality. Inside this tub are four baby chicks. I blame Instagram, chronic sleep deprivation, and a momentary, wildly inaccurate delusion that our London semi-detached property could support an agrarian lifestyle. It all started innocently enough last Tuesday at 2 a.m. when I found myself blindly typing a search for a baby chick into my phone while waiting for Twin A to finish her milk.

There's a specific kind of madness that takes over a parent when they decide their children need more exposure to nature. You look at your two-year-olds, currently fighting over a plastic TV remote, and you think that introducing agricultural poultry into your postcode will somehow transform them into serene, barefoot woodland nymphs. It won't. It will just mean you spend your evenings scrubbing pine shavings out of the carpet while smelling faintly of a barnyard.

The late night internet rabbit hole

You might think acquiring farm animals requires a tractor and a handshake with a man named Farmer Jim, but it turns out you can just buy them on the internet. Finding baby chicks for sale is alarmingly easy. There are massive hatcheries online that will literally put day-old birds in a cardboard box and hand them to the Royal Mail.

This presented a logistical nightmare for me. Many of these mail-order places demand a minimum order of fifteen chicks just so the sheer mass of their tiny bodies keeps them warm in transit. I don't have space for fifteen chickens. If fifteen chickens start roaming my garden, my neighbours will undoubtedly form a pitchfork-wielding mob and run us out of the borough. Eventually, I found a local agricultural feed store an hour's drive away that let me buy just four of them. I brought them home in a ventilated cardboard box that chirped the entire drive down the M25, making me feel like I was transporting a bomb made of marshmallows.

Dr Evans ruins the cuddles

The first thing the twins did when I brought the box inside was attempt to climb directly into it, arms outstretched, screaming with the kind of joy usually reserved for Peppa Pig. This brings us to the most stressful part of the entire endeavour.

I had casually mentioned our new flock to our GP, Dr Evans, when I was in to get a prescription for yet another ear infection. She looked at me over her glasses, let out a deep sigh, and explained that these adorable, fluffy little miracles are basically tiny biological weapons. From what I managed to understand through my panic, they carry Salmonella on their feathers and in their droppings, even if they look perfectly pristine. Dr Evans told me that young kids have immune systems that are essentially made of wet tissue paper, and getting anywhere near the birds' beaks or faces could end up with a terrifying hospital trip.

So now, rather than the idyllic pastoral bonding experience I envisioned, interacting with the chicks involves me shouting like a drill sergeant, making the girls scrub their hands with enough antibacterial soap to sterilise an operating theatre if they even look at the plastic tub.

Distracting the toddlers from the disease birds

Keeping twin two-year-olds away from something fluffy and forbidden is a full-time occupation. Twin B had an absolute, floor-thrashing meltdown yesterday because I wouldn't let her carry one of the Silkies around by its neck. She was inconsolable.

In a moment of pure desperation, I grabbed our Colorful Universe Bamboo Baby Blanket from the sofa and wrapped her into a tight, cosmic burrito. I've to be honest, this blanket is probably one of the best things we own. It’s made from this organic bamboo blend that's absurdly soft, and somehow it keeps stable temperature so she doesn't get instantly sweaty when she's throwing a tantrum. I don't pretend to understand the thermodynamics of bamboo fibres, but the smooth texture and the little orange planets seemed to short-circuit her rage. I sat on the floor rocking my furious burrito until she forgot about the chickens. It's brilliant, even if I do occasionally use it to wipe a mysterious smudge off my own trousers when I can't find a muslin.

We've also tried using the woodland theme to our advantage. We bought the Organic Cotton Squirrel Blanket thinking it fit our new rustic vibe. It's fine, honestly. The organic cotton is perfectly soft and does exactly what a blanket should do, but the beige background shows absolutely every single muddy footprint when one of the girls inevitably drags it past the brooder box in the hallway. It does the job, but I'd reach for the universe one first every time.

The absolute terror of the traditional heat lamp

If you take nothing else away from my descent into amateur poultry farming, let it be this: traditional heat lamps are the devil's work.

When you bring day-old birds into your house, they need an ambient temperature of about 35 degrees Celsius because they don't have real feathers yet. The old-school way to do this is to buy a massive bulb that glows an eerie, demonic red, attach it to a metal dome, and clamp it to the side of your plastic box. The clamp is invariably a flimsy spring mechanism that looks like it was engineered by a drunk person in the 1950s.

I set one up for exactly twenty minutes before I started having intrusive thoughts about the clamp failing, the 250-watt bulb falling into a bed of dry wood shavings, and my entire house going up in a glorious, fiery inferno. I sat there watching it, sweating from the heat it was throwing off, calculating how quickly I could evacuate the twins. I threw it in the bin the very next morning. Instead, I shelled out for a radiant heat plate, which is basically a tiny heated table the chicks huddle underneath, mimicking a mother hen. It doesn't glow, it won't burn the house down, and it let me actually sleep for a few hours without dreaming of sirens.

A brief word on water

Chicks are phenomenally stupid and will happily drown in a bowl of water that's half an inch deep, so just put a shallow dish filled with glass marbles in there so they can drink out of the cracks without submersing their entire heads.

The bizarre speed of growing up

It's deeply weird watching something develop so fast when you're used to human babies. It took the twins fourteen months to figure out how to walk across the living room without face-planting into the skirting board. The baby chicks were running around scratching at the ground on day two.

I remember spending hours laying the girls under their Rainbow Play Gym Set, gently shaking the wooden elephant toy just hoping they'd make a vaguely coordinated swipe at it. That play gym was brilliant for them, actually. The natural wood and the quiet, muted colours were a massive relief from the glaring plastic, battery-operated monstrosities that usually fill our living room. It gave them a sturdy, safe place to figure out how their arms worked without overstimulating them into a meltdown. The chicks, meanwhile, figured out how to jump on top of their food bowl and scatter expensive organic starter feed across the hallway by day four. It hardly seems fair.

So, we're now a chicken family. They currently live in a box in the hall, smelling faintly of warm dust and impending chaos. Soon they'll move outside to a coop I haven't quite figured out how to build yet. If you're tempted by those soft, chirping videos on social media, just know that beneath that fluffy exterior is a tiny, fragile creature that requires military-grade hygiene protocols and a lot of expensive equipment.

If you're currently trying to calm a toddler who has just been informed they can't kiss a live farm animal, you might want to browse our collection of soothing organic blankets to help diffuse the situation.

Before you dive headfirst into the local feed store, maybe read through some of the realities below to see if you've the stomach for the peeping.

Questions you might have before buying

Do mail-order chicks actually survive the postal service?

Miraculously, yes, though I still find the concept baffling. Hatcheries time the shipping perfectly so the birds rely on the yolk sack they absorbed right before hatching, which sustains them for a couple of days. But honestly, the stress of tracking a parcel of live animals on an app while waiting for the postman was too much for my nervous system, which is why I drove to a farm shop instead.

How do you stop a two-year-old from squishing them?

You don't, which is why the toddlers are never, ever allowed to hold them unsupervised. We do a "one-finger stroke" rule where I hold the bird securely with both hands and the girls are allowed to gently stroke the back with one single finger, followed immediately by a panicked march to the bathroom sink to scrub with soap.

What's chick grit and do I really need it?

Chickens don't have teeth, which seems like an evolutionary oversight. They digest food by storing little rocks in their gizzard to grind things up. If you're only feeding them commercial starter crumb, they might be fine, but the second you give them a tiny piece of scrambled egg or a mashed pea as a treat, they need chick grit (basically coarse sand) to process it, otherwise it just sits in their crop and causes massive problems.

Can we just keep them inside forever as pets?

Unless you want your home to be entirely coated in a fine layer of dander, feathers, and dust that somehow adheres to the walls and ceiling, absolutely not. They're cute for about three weeks. By week four, they look like awkward teenagers going through a punk phase, and they kick their bedding out of the box with astonishing force. Plan your outdoor coop long before you bring them home.

Why can't I just use a desk lamp for heat?

Because desk lamps don't provide the ambient 35-degree heat a chick needs to survive, and sticking a high-wattage bulb into a standard desk lamp is a fantastic way to melt the plastic casing and summon the fire brigade. Bite the bullet and buy proper, safe agricultural heating equipment.