Oh, that wascally wabbit!

Look where the Easter Bunny hid Kiddo's basket this year:

The Easter Bunny is clearly employing the same strategy he used way back in the day, when my Easter basket was found after a lengthy search (and ultimately several "you're getting warmer/colder" type hints from my dad, who had located it already) neatly taped to the ceiling above the dining room chandelier.  Yes, I walked around the dining room approximately 800 times that morning before I ever found it.  It's a miracle we ever made it out the door to church that day, considering that back in the 70s we used to go to the sunrise service for Easter.  (I asked my mother earlier this afternoon if she and Dad were planning on attending the sunrise service tomorrow.  She laughed maniacally before informing me that no, they'll be going to the 10:30am service instead.  Oh, how I would've loved a 10:30 church service back in my youth instead of the crack o' dawn!)

The butterfly in front of the basket is one Kiddo made and always hangs from that plant hook.  This hook is located directly above the area where Kiddo currently has her Littlest Pet Shop/Star Wars/safari animal Empire spread out on the family room carpet.  Anyone want to hazard a guess as to how long it'll take her to look up and spot it?  I reckon it will either be something she spots instantly when she comes down the stairs into the family room (she has heard the story of the year my basket was on the ceiling before) or she'll never spot it at all.  I sent the picture to my parents and asked them how long they think it'll take her to find it.  Dad's answer? "Fourth of July."  Considering this is a kid who can't find her sneakers on the kitchen floor when she's looking right at them, Grandpa might be pretty accurate...

Stay tuned!

(And never fear, these

aren't in there yet.  The Easter Bunny won't hide them until after church tomorrow, so they're still safely in the fridge, where they have been tempting both Hubby and Kiddo since yesterday afternoon.  Easter is the only time of year I ever hard boil eggs.  I do not fancy hard boiled eggs in any form - plain, deviled, saladed - so they each get six a year.  Kiddo is already salivating in anticipation of Monday's lunch.  Hard boiled eggs and a bologna and provolone sandwich - she'll be quite popular in the cafeteria, I'm sure.  Heh.)

Where's the most creative place the Easter Bunny ever hid a basket in your house?

Hakuna Matata!

Well, that was quite a weekend we just had here in the Smith family. One of those "I need a weekend to get over my weekend" type deals. It all started bright and early Friday morning, when we loaded up Ye Olde Minivan and headed west to Lansing, Michigan. Why'd we do that, you ask? Because Lansing is where the national tour of The Lion King happens to be playing right now.

You see, Kiddo is a bit of a musical theater nerd, just like her mama. Kiddo also is completely obsessed with The Lion King. She claimed my OBC soundtrack for her own years ago, and has since memorized every word, note, grunt, roar and snort therein. We own the movie, which she has watched at least a million times. We have the storybook version of The Lion King, which she has read at least two million times. She has not one, but two Simba stuffed animals. Every year when we go to Walt Disney World, we see the Festival of the Lion King at Animal Kingdom, and Kiddo is rapt throughout. So, a few months ago, Hubby and I were talking about how much we thought Kiddo would enjoy seeing the actual stage production. Our first thought was, of course, Broadway, where we had seen TLK many, many moons ago ourselves. Hubby hopped online and quickly discovered that these days, a ticket to TLK costs approximately four arms and three legs, especially multiplied by three. On to the next thought - perhaps the national tour would be coming back to our fair city sometime soon? Hubby looked into it and discovered that sadly, no, it isn't going to be stopping back here in the near future. That was when he discovered that the tour would be playing in Lansing in April. Some further research led him to the conclusion that we could get three awesome seats and a hotel room overnight for less than what it would cost us to see the show on Broadway (which would include free lodging at Chez Grandparents in Jersey). Furthermore, Google Maps informed him that driving from our house to Lansing takes almost exactly the same amount of time as driving from our house to Chez Grandparents. Seemed like a no-brainer to us, so we ordered the tickets, made the hotel reservation and put a big star on the calendar.

So there we were, setting out Friday morning, Kiddo watching the first of her vast Veggietales DVD collection, Hubby and I overcaffeinating with Wild Cherry Diet Pepsi and Mountain Dew Code Red, respectively. Now, the thing about driving mostly due west from our home is that it takes us a bit out of the country:



And it turns out that this is the more direct route than staying in the US and going the long way around the eastern Great Lakes. We had renewed our passports and gotten Kiddo her very first passport a few months ago in anticipation of this trip, so we weren't sweating it. We made good time over the border into Canada, stopping for a quick bathroom break during which Kiddo had to go sit next to "the really shiny guy" on the bench inside the Duty Free shop...



We continued on our way through what must surely be one of the most boring stretches of eastern Canada (no offense intended to the lovely inhabitants of this section of the country; I know anyone would have the same impression should they be driving along the NYS Thruway in our neck of the woods as well). It was so boring that I promptly fell asleep, as I am wont to do whenever I'm in a car anyhow. I was awakened from my midmorning nap a short while later by the energetic and loud serenade of a bunch of singing vegetables - Kiddo had decided to remove the headphones connecting her ears to the portable DVD player (and seriously, was there ever a better invention for the sanity of all adults on long car rides than the portable DVD player? I know that as a child, we made several long car trips - I'm talking NJ to Florida and back length trips - and I know that I certainly would've appreciated the opportunity to gorge myself on repeated viewings of Dirty Dancing or Pretty in Pink or A Chorus Line, the Movie instead of playing endless rounds of Herbie Car - what my family called Punch Buggy - or "Mom, she's touching me! She's on my side!" and praying that my Walkman batteries wouldn't run out before lunch....). The Veggietales crew might provide wholesome and often humorous entertainment, but they certainly do not provide good lullaby-esque music by which one can nap, especially when the portable DVD player is strapped to the headrest directly behind one's head.

We zipped along through Canada, feeling like we were driving much faster than we actually were thanks to the cute, metric speed limits (100 KPH? Wow, we must be flying!) and in no time, we were circling 'round Lake Huron and approaching the US Border once more. We were getting hungry, but Hubby refused to stop at any of the Fifth Wheel Truck Stops we'd passed for lunch despite my begging (come on now - they had HUGE signs proclaiming BREAKFAST ALL DAY, and we were in Canada, where they surely have maple syrup instead of Aunt Jemima or Mrs. Butterworth, right?). We pulled up to the bridge back into the US and promptly came to a

dead

stop.

It turns out that many, many Canadians really wanted to head into Port Huron for Good Friday. Who knew? We sat on the scary, heart-stoppingly high bridge over the lake for a good ninety minutes. Plenty of time for me to get this shot of the beautiful view of the sparkling, clear blue waters of Lake Huron out my window:



When we were finally back in the US of A, we stopped at the first Golden Arches we came across that we could see from the highway. That is one of Hubby's Road Trip Rules: it isn't enough to see a sign telling you there is a Mickey D's or Wendy's or gas station at the next exit, the actual building itself must be visible from the highway or you do not pull off the main road. This rule came about after one too many frantic attempts to get gas or change a blow-out diaper where we found ourselves traipsing about the dark, back woods of Nowhere, PA, driving further and further from the main road and in some cases, unable to get right back on to the highway where we exited. So, after a later-than-we'd-planned-for lunch, we trekked onwards, finally arriving at our hotel in West Lansing.

We stayed at a Residence Inn, which meant we had a suite with kitchenette instead of just a room. Kiddo was extremely excited to learn that she was sleeping on the magical sofa that would transform into a bed just for her. We didn't disabuse her of the idea that it was a special treat to sleep on the pull-out bed, either. Kiddo and I changed into swimsuits and headed down to the pool (excellent sensory input for her, as well as a way to stretch and burn off some energy after spending almost 8 hours strapped into a booster seat watching animated veggies frolicking about). Unfortunately, we were not the only people enjoying a late afternoon dip. It seemed that the West Lansing Residence Inn was the gathering point for someone's large family function. Could've been a wedding or maybe a large family reunion, but there were fifteen adults and at least two dozen children who all were related/knew each other well already occupying the relatively small pool and hot tub area when Kiddo and I arrived.

Now, when I say "large family reunion" I am not emphasizing it quite the way you'd expect. What I mean to say is, it was a LARGE family. As in "Biggest Loser" large. Now, I am not a small woman. The words "slender" or "svelte" do not ever apply to my person, especially when my person is squeezed into any sort of swimming gear. I freely and openly acknowledge this. However, I was the smallest adult woman in the pool area by at least half. The men were even bigger, and most of the children were equally rotund. Oh, and they were all REALLY, REALLY loud, too. It was insane. Despite the fact that the deepest part of the pool was only 4ft 2in and there were impressive NO DIVING signs on every available surface, the Large Family was diving with abandon. Come to think of it, the amount of water that was being displaced by cellulite and cannonballs probably brought the water down to closer to the two feet deep level, and made a "lazy river rapids" sort of effect all the way around the pool, as well. Consequently, Kiddo and I didn't stay in the pool area for more than 20 or 25 minutes before heading back up to our room, where Hubby had set up the computer (yay, hotel with free WiFi!) and located a nearby Domino's with coupons online and ordered us some pizza for dinner.

Soon enough, we were all bathed/showered and fed and tucking ourselves in to sleep in our respective beds.



Now, remember how I said our suite came with a kitchenette? That kitchenette included a fridge/freezer that had an ice maker as well as a cute, miniature dishwasher. We'd started up the dishwasher after dinner, thinking it would provide a bit of white noise for Kiddo as she was in the front part of the suite, closest to the hallway, and the Large Family were no quieter moving about the rest of the hotel than they were in the pool. Turns out that the teeny-tiny dishwasher operated via a very loud engine. A loud, slow engine that clanked and roared for a good hour after we'd turned it on and tucked her in some eight feet away. Whoops. Eventually, though, the dishwasher wheezed to a halt, the Large Family stopped thundering past our door in the hall, and peace and quiet settled over our suite. Everyone drifted off to sleep, and then the ice maker in the freezer began to work.

This was a Very Special ice maker. When we'd first arrived at the room and were investigating all the features therein, I peered into the freezer and noted the lack of any cubes in the tray below the ice maker. Hubby subsequently jiggled a few bits in the freezer and proclaimed it broken. Not quite. In the wee, small hours of the night, the ice maker decided the time was nigh to produce a cube. One cube. But not just any little cube. The effort required by this machine to produce one cube started off with a noise akin to the Space Shuttle gearing up for blast-off from the launching pad. After ten minutes of this machinery grinding away, building to an ever-crescendoing roar, it popped out its cube with a resounding BANG that sounded like a shotgun being fired, again from mere feet away from my sleeping child. Needless to say, the noise woke me up. The ice maker continued to "work" in this manner irregularly throughout the night, the Space Shuttle crescendoing roar leading up to the shotgun blast of the cube shooting out into the tray. If I didn't know how quietly water actually does freeze, I'd completely believe that this level of ferocity and sound was totally required to fuse those Hs and Os into a solid, cold mass. I do know better, though, so I was not impressed or amused.

At any rate, despite the Thundering Herd of Larges and the World's Loudest Ice Maker, we all managed to get some sleep, if not of the highest quality. (I forgot to mention the West Lansing Residence Inn also featured the World's Worst Pillows. They seemed promising enough, all fluffy and big, but they were of the Insidiously Evil Feather variety, whereupon you rest your head waaaay up on top of a pillow or three, and in mere seconds, your head is down on the mattress with pillow puffed up around your face in a most suffocating-esque way.) Morning arrived, and Hubby took his turn taking Kiddo to the pool. Luckily for him, the Large Family had bypassed the early-morning exercise option in favor of the free, full breakfast offered by the hotel, and he and Kiddo were the only people in the pool area. I opted to surf the 'net and take a super-long shower (yay for endless hotel hot water!). Hubby checked out the breakfast scene on the way back from the pool, and reported upon their return that there was no room at the inn, or at least in the restaurant area. Yep, he'd met the Large Family. He made a few trips from the restaurant to our room instead, bringing us some very tasty breakfast (though I bet not as tasty as breakfast-for-lunch would've been at the Fifth Wheel). We had some time to kill before heading out to the show (remember the show? I know I've spent paragraphs here on the hotel, but really, we were there for the show) so Kiddo watched some TV (including more Veggietales, which are in the Saturday morning cartoon line-up apparently), Hubby "worked" on his computer and I watched vintage Law and Order (oh Jerry Orbach, how I miss you) and napped a bit in the other room, then we nuked some leftover pizza for lunch before packing up our stuff when it was time to head out.

We bid the Large Family and the Residence Inn a fond farewell (Kiddo, in the parking lot, blowing kisses to the building: "Goodbye, Michigan hotel. I'll miss you. I'll come back soon! *mwah*") and made our way to Michigan State University, where TLK was playing, while Kiddo watched our Lion King DVD in the back seat. We drove around campus for a bit and then did some parking garage strategizing to optimize our chances of a quick exit after the show. We paused in front of the theater to get this shot (after Hubby graciously offered to take the same picture for a family that had thought of the idea first)



and then it was showtime! Well, not quite. We couldn't even get into the lobby yet, and stood in the entrance way as Kiddo looked longingly through the doors at the lady setting up the Official Lion King Souvenirs Stand a few yards into the lobby. Finally we could enter the lobby, and we made our way past several OLKS Stands (as well as a few Roasted Nut stands, oddly enough) and up to the balcony level. We found the right set of doors and were told that we'd need to wait a bit more before we could go in, so wait we did. When the doors opened, we discovered that the front row of the balcony at the Wharton Center is not only very high up (I know I've mentioned my utterly incredible fear of heights before) but had a long, sloping ledge off the front down which one could easily slide before plummeting to the orchestra level below. My palms are sweating as I type this just from thinking of it, I kid you not. We settled in for the show, which began after at least a dozen more announcements reminding us in no uncertain terms that photographic or other recording devices were most definitely prohibited.

Finally, finally, finally it was showtime. The lights dimmed, the curtain rose, the music swelled and The Lion King began. We had great seats despite the sickening height, as it turns out. Kiddo was transfixed, and Hubby and I were as captivated by this production as we'd been when we saw the original on Broadway. I briefly regretted not choosing an aisle seat in the orchestra section when the actors made their entrance at the beginning of the show, but at the beginning of the second act, one of the bird actors stood not ten feet away from us, swooping and soaring his bird in circles directly over our head. It was awesome. Kiddo did not like the strobe light/exploding bursts of steam and smoke effects that accompanied some of Scar's "villian" scenes, but was not the least bit upset by the wildebeest stampede (which we'd thought she might find scary). At the intermission, Hubby went off to find some snacks and Kiddo announced she had to use the bathroom, level "emergency" so we joined the line at the ladies' room.

Now, it appeared the balcony seated maybe 800 people or so. It was a near-capacity crowd. There was exactly ONE ladies' room for the entire balcony section. We were maybe 40 or 50 people back in line when Kiddo, who was growing increasingly frantic, told me that she "could feel the pee starting to come out" and I had to make a snap decision. I hoisted her up by the armpits, and bearing her aloft in front of me like a shield, I cut to the front of the line. The woman who was at that point next (along with her maybe 10 or 11 year old daughter) most graciously allowed us to go ahead of them, and I got Kiddo into the stall and on the seat with not even a millisecond to spare. I didn't even bother closing the stall door - I was peeling her tights down as we hustled into the stall. Whew, that was a close one. Since we had cut the line, I didn't feel right using the facilities myself, so I opted to rely upon my Bladder of Steel and we exited the stall as quickly as we could when Kiddo was done. She was apologizing and thanking everyone in line behind us as we washed our hands and made our way back out of the bathroom (and I would like to extend my own apologies and thanks to all the women and girls we cut in front of as well; I know you all had to go, too, and I appreciate your allowing us to avoid a pants-wetting incident that doubtless would not have been pleasant), where we rejoined Hubby who had managed to acquire a small bottle of water, 2 mediocre and very dry chocolate chip cookies and a small bag of chocolate-covered peanuts for approximately $15. That boost of sugar was enough to get Kiddo bouncing, and before we knew it, the show was over and the actors were taking their third (well-deserved) curtain call.

Back out to the garage, where Kiddo changed into her jammies and strapped in to watch yet more Veggietales DVDs (I swear to you, we brought many, many NON-VT DVDs with us as well, but Kiddo was on a veggie kick) and Hubby's pre-show parking strategy worked like a charm, getting us out of the garage and on our way back to Canada in less than three minutes flat. With a few quick stops for bathroom breaks, food and gas, we were back in New York and approaching our town by a little after 11:00 Saturday night. Oh, and for the last hour and a half or so of the ride, we were wowed by the sight of the moon rising low on the horizon. It was so darkly orange that it resembled the setting sun more than the rising moon, and I spent a good twenty minutes trying to take a decent picture of it through the windshield. Sadly, this is the best I could do:



and it doesn't nearly capture the orangey-ness or largeness of what we saw. The higher the moon rose, the less colorful it became, but trust me, it was an amazing sight.

Once we arrived back at the homestead, Hubby carried Kiddo up to bed and I began assisting the Easter Bunny in basket prep and hiding. (Yeah, I know, I should've done that before we left. Idiot.) Thankfully, the late night and excitement of the trip meant Kiddo slept in until 7:40 yesterday morning, instead of being up and in search of baskets at the crack of dawn, as is customary. She found her basket and promptly surveyed the loot brought by Mommy and Daddy the Easter Bunny.


While I was salivating at the sight of Cadbury mini-creme eggs and the giant Gertrude Hawk Chocolate Dinosaur Egg, Kiddo was most excited by the arrival of Pico, the Chihuahua (or Chewawa who is "so cyoot" according to the various odes Kiddo penned later on, during church and afterwards). Kiddo took Pico up to her room to meet the rest of her Stuffed Animal Entourage and I decided the time was right to hide to have the Easter Bunny hide our eggs in the back yard. Hubby was watching golf on TV at this point, so I left him in charge of making sure I the Easter Bunny was not discovered. Imagine my surprise when I came in from the deck to find Kiddo standing in the living room! Shooting Glares of Death at Hubby (who returned them with the Shrug and Raised Eyebrows of "What did you want me to do?"), I quickly explained to Kiddo that I had noticed the empty egg carton in the fridge when I went to start breakfast, so I'd gone outside to see where the Easter Bunny had hidden her eggs this year - in the front or back yard. Kiddo bought the line and insisted upon immediately going out to find the eggs, so we did. Well, by "we" I mean Kiddo and I, as Hubby wisely opted to stay inside where it wasn't a wind chill of 29 degrees. I wound up giving Kiddo "you're getting warmer/colder" type hints just to hurry things along (and because she was really not doing that spectacular a job of finding not-very-concealed, brightly colored eggs) before any of our extremities blackened from frostbite and fell clear off.



Once that was done, we returned inside to thaw and enjoyed some Easter omelets cooked by Hubby, then it was time to get ready for church. (Yay for church that doesn't start until 10:45!) After church, Kiddo played with Pico and the rest of her SAE, Hubby watched golf and I took an Easter nap. But, not before I got a few shots of Kiddo (and Pico) in her Easter ensemble....



Any girl knows that dresses - especially ones with crinolines! - were made for twirling...



In conclusion, Hakuna Matata and He is Risen, hallelujah! Hope you and yours had a wonderful weekend, and a happy Easter or Passover or whatever you may celebrate. Now, stay out of my way as I hit the post-Easter candy clearance bins, okay? At least, stay away from the Cadbury Creme Eggs, as they are MINE!

Phriday Photo Phun - Eggstra Eggciting!

Ye Annual Dyeing of the Easter Eggs, 2009!

Kiddo's getting better at dyeing just the egg, and not her hands/shirt/pants/the table/the floor anymore:





I seem to remember the Paas egg kits coming with a "clear" crayon for marking the eggs before dyeing, so the writing would magically appear when the egg was lifted out of the cup. There wasn't a crayon in this kit, but we made do with a white one out of Kiddo's vast crayon collection. Worked like a charm.



Kiddo is old enough now to manage the trickier egg-dyeing maneuvers, like the two-color egg, without any difficulty:



Ta da! The artist and her finished work!



Okay, okay, I confess - I dyed three of the dozen myself, including the dark yellow one third from the right on the bottom row. Two I dyed as exemplars for Kiddo (for the double-dipping and crayon techniques) and the dark yellow one was in homage to my childhood. (If this were an early-season episode of Lost, this is the point at which we'd zoom in for an extreme close-up of my eyes as I did the Flashback Stare.....) See, back in the day (that day being in the mid-70s), my next-oldest sister and I would watch those classic Rankin-Bass Easter TV specials each year (you remember, the ones that had this at the beginning:

Man, that always got us SOOOOO excited!) and our favorite of all the Easter programming (sorry, Jesus) was Here Comes Peter Cottontail. Now, in HCPC, there was a Bad Bunny who sabotaged Peter and turned his eggs all a horrible, dark green at one crucial point of the story (sorry if this is a spoiler, but come on now, the special is as old as I am....). Anyhow, that was our favorite part of the special, and each year when we were dyeing our Easter eggs, my sister and I would try to dye one so dark green that it would come out like the Bad Bunny's egg. (Wikipedia helpfully reminds me that the Bad Bunny's name is January Q. Irontail, and he was voiced by the fantabulous Vincent Price, just in case there was any doubt as to his villainy.) Anyhow, each year when we had finished dyeing our dozens (yes, plural - we usually did 4 dozen, though some years we did only 3 dozen) of eggs, Mom would start to collect up the dye cups to pour them down the sink and thusly discover our Irontailesque attempt. Invariably, she'd chastise us and toss that egg out, but one year, one glorious year, we hatched a plan (hatched! an egg pun! woo!) wherein we ever-so-generously offered to clean up after ourselves when done with the dyeing. Mom, who should've known enough to be suspicious of any such offer from the likes of us, was apparently sleep deprived enough that year (as my youngest sister was then just a baby) that she agreed and summarily left us alone in the kitchen. Mwah-ha-ha-ha-ha! We proceeded to pour several of the darkest dyes together - green, blue, purple - and dunked the last undyed egg, which we'd hidden away (easy enough for Mom to lose count when there were so many eggs being colored), into the cup. We then hid the cup on the back of a shelf, tucked behind the flour canister where it wouldn't be discovered. After dinner, I snuck back into the kitchen, retrieved the egg from the shelf and stuck it in the fridge with the rest of its brethren to await the arrival of the Easter Bunny.

It was a total triumph - the Easter Bunny (who may or may not have borne a strong resemblance at the time to our dad...) never noticed the peculiar dye job on that one egg and just hid it along with the rest of them the next morning. During the Easter egg hunt that year, my sister and I could barely contain our glee as we searched for the egg. It came out a most putrid blackish-green, as you might expect, and we were positively cackling when we came upon it in the back yard. My mom (again, in all probability rather sleep-deprived) went to peel it in the kitchen after the hunt was over and was horrified to discover that the dye had penetrated through the shell, rendering the white and even the yolk a nasty grayish green color (and yes, that egg did get tossed and was not eaten). (Though, there were other years when we wouldn't manage to find all the eggs - even with Dad's "list from the Easter Bunny" of where things had been hidden - and then weeks later, one of the dogs would find and eat that missing egg, only to return it to us in the form of voluminous vomiting a short time later, usually inside on a carpet.)

Anyhow, we wound up telling Mom what we'd done, and surprisingly enough, not only were we not reprimanded, but from that year on, we were allowed to try to dye one egg as dark as we could, always trying to outdo that first year (we never quite managed) and that egg was thereafter known as the Heather Egg. So, in honor of the Heather Egg, I dropped one egg into the yellow dye and left it there as long as Kiddo would let me. Once she grew impatient with my dye-hogging, I pulled it out. It still got fairly dark, though, dontcha think?



Now, I didn't fully explain why I was hogging the yellow dye to Kiddo, but I did tell her it was something her aunt and I used to do when we were kids. Goodness knows, Kiddo has already heard her share of "back when I was a kid" stories out of me. Heck, some of them she can even repeat back to me, like the story of How Mommy Got That Scar on Her Cheek (subtitle: The Time Mommy and Aunt A Didn't Listen to Grandma and Scratched Their Chicken Pox Spots) though I have plenty more saved up for future use... I mean, Kiddo isn't quite six yet, I can't burn through my whole repertoire now, or whatever will I have to pull out and use during the teenage years?

I wonder if that special is still around - maybe it's on DVD......... off to Google it I go!




For more Phriday Photo Phun, drop by Candid Carrie's, and wish her congratulations on the adoption finalization of her youngest two kids while you're there!

Speaking of cute, little birdies...

To go along with the retelling of how my grandmother gassed her beloved canary (see below), I have another bird-related item to share.

Hubby was watching the show How It's Made, which we love here at our house, while he was cooking dinner tonight. He called Kiddo and me downstairs to watch something he'd just seen. He said it was the best How It's Made segment he'd ever watched, and after watching it twice (because I just couldn't believe my eyes the first time), I have to concur. Thankfully, some intrepid souls (who obviously share our amazement at this whole thing) have uploaded the relevant segment to YouTube.

Check these chicks out! Seriously, this is wild!!!



I mean, I guess it makes sense that there are commercial hatcheries, but isn't that the craziest thing you've ever seen? Kiddo and I were cracking each other up by narrating the chicks' journey down the various contraptions: "Whooooooooa! CHUTE!" etc... hilarious!

Of course, this didn't stop us for a second from enjoying the chicken and sausage pasta dish Hubby whipped up for dinner. 'Twas delicious!

Finch Finale

I hadn't noticed Mama bird on/near her nest in the past two days, which was highly unusual. When looking out the window closest to the basket, I'd been able to see not only Mama and Papa coming and going, but also the babies who were big enough to be seen above the edge of the nest. I was growing concerned that perhaps the babies had been abandoned, so I finally took the basket down to check on what was happening.

Oh no! Empty nest syndrome!

Hubby and I were concerned that the fledglings had met some grim end, but we googled house finches and learned that babies typically leave the nest between 12 and 19 days. So, it is quite possible that they simply flew away. We also read that the young finches tend to flock together and feed together, and there certainly was a crowd of finches at the feeder on the porch, so I'm going to keep stocking that feeder for the babies or any other finches that may drop by. I'm also leaving the nest in the basket for another week or so, just in case they return to it for a snooze or something. Apparently house finches will lay up to six separate clutches of eggs in brooding season, but they build new nests for each one, so Mama and Papa will not be back for another round in the petunia basket.

(By the by, while doing my best Grissom impression and searching the vicinity for evidence that some criminal end had befallen the baby birds, I did come across the corpse of the baby sparrow in a rather advanced state of decomp. Ew. I do much better with grisly findings when they're contained within the parameters of my TV set!)

So, it seems we're through with Finch Watch 2008. I'm keeping my eyes peeled for any other nesting situations in our yard - I would totally love to discover a hummingbird nest but the hummingbirds that frequent our feeder always seem to arrive from and depart to parts unknown beyond our back yard fence, so I'm not too confident that there are any hummingbird nests to be found. In the meantime, we've identified many species of birds that flock to our feeders (and who are now emptying all of the feeders in 24 hours or less) and have learned that we have brown-headed cowbirds, goldfinches and what I think was a towhee along with the birds I already could identify - robins, mourning doves (one of whom who had foiled my berry patch netting and was moseying around inside the patch the other day, grrr), red-winged blackbirds and one blue jay. The kiddo has been listening to the bird calls that came with the guidebook in her room, which is a bit disconcerting at times when all of a sudden you hear, say, a screech owl cry that sounds like it is inside the house... Better that, though, than to be listening to the CD in our car, which we did the other day. Nothing can make a short trip longer than 587 bird calls chirping away inside the van, let me tell you!

Eating like a bird?! Ha!

We've had bird feeders in our yard for several years now. We started with just one, and this year are up to three (not counting the occasional peanut butter-pine cone type feeder the kiddo makes and brings home from school), as well as a hummingbird feeder.

Let me tell you, that expression "S/he eats like a bird" is not exactly accurate, at least not around our house. We have been going through more birdseed than I could ever have imagined, and I don't even keep the feeders constantly full. Seriously, I just finished off a 25 lb bag of seed that Hubby bought last month. That's a lot of seed. We don't have squirrels or other non-bird type feeder raiders, by the way - in the 8.5 years we've lived here, I've never seen a single squirrel or chipmunk anywhere in the neighborhood. I think the lack of utility poles and the small number of trees has something to do with that...

We have a lot of different birds that frequent the backyard feeders, everything from itty-bitty sparrows up to big, fat mourning doves. (The mourning doves are extremely lazy - they will sit on the ground under the feeders and wait for a more enterprising bird to tip some seed out from above, then eat off the ground.) I've seen cardinals and goldfinches and we have blackbirds by the piefull. We also have loads of robins, and since I put up the third feeder on the front porch for the petunia basket family, we are positively lousy with finches, too.

As I was out refilling the feeders just now, I could hear bird calls picking up and getting more excited and loud. (Yes, I may be anthropomorphizing here, but I swear I'm not exaggerating.) It sounded for all the world like some birdfeeder scout was alerting the copse behind our property "She's finally refilled the feeders - chow time, y'all!" Sure enough, within five minutes of my returning indoors, the back yard is full of birds, in our two pear trees and all over the ground. Makes me extra-glad we covered the berry patch!

The hummingbird feeder is especially exciting to me. I never get tired of watching the hummingbirds come in for a drink of nectar (I make my own) and then dart away again over our fence. Some of them are smaller than large dragonflies and others are quite big. According to the hummingbird websites I've checked, we don't have many varieties in our neck of the woods, but I've seen a few that don't look like regulars for area every now and again. If we lived somewhere further south, where they get the more exotic varieties of hummingbirds, I might never leave my back yard or my window! I've been trying in vain to photograph the hummingbirds at the feeder for years now. If I had a fancier camera, like the one my dad has with the multiple shutter speeds and especially the crazy zoom lens (I'm pretty sure he could get a picture of our hummingbird feeder from an upstairs window from the farm in NJ), I would likely be more successful. Well, it's something to keep me busy, stalking the feeder with my base model camera at the ready.

Speaking of photographing birds, I finally managed to get a relatively clear shot of Mama Finch on her nest through the front window yesterday. The basket was swaying in the wind (we had some severe storms blow through and the wind was no gentle summer breeze!) so it isn't the sharpest photo, but I think you can see Mama clearly enough...

With said storms, I did take the baskets off the hooks for a bit so they wouldn't blow away during the worst of the wind. To my surprise, I realized I was wrong when I said there were only four babies in the nest - number five is there, albeit a lot smaller than his/her siblings! Woo! All five finches made it!

By the way, are these bird-related posts really boring? Am I driving readers away from my blog with the incessant bird chatter? Hmmm. I just find the whole thing kinda fascinating, as evidenced by my continued posting. Hopefully someone out there is as interested as I am in the topic...

Lazy Sunday

First of all, if this post's title made Chris Parnell and Andy Samberg's SNL digital short run through your head, welcome to my brain. (The Chronic what? Cles of Narnia!) I've loved that clip since its original airing...

We've had a lazy Sunday here this year for Father's Day. I asked Hubby what he wanted to do today and his (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) response was "Breakfast. Nap. Lunch. Nap. Watch golf. Eat dinner. Watch more golf. Sleep." Well, the only Smiths that napped today turned out to be the cat (as per usual) and the kiddo, which was unusual but she's running a fever today, due, I think, to the four booster shots she had late Friday afternoon (quadruple OUCH but at least we're done with vaccines now until middle school). At least I'm hoping that's all that is causing it - she is asymptomatic otherwise, and certainly perked up following the nap, lunch, a popsicle from the ice cream truck, a water balloon toss with Mommy while Daddy practiced putting in the back yard and relaxing inside in the AC.

Speaking of AC, the AC still isn't fixed in the Sienna. Yes, argh to the tenth degree. Apparently there was a second part they didn't expect would need replacing, but it does, and they didn't have that part on hand, so it's now been ordered and we have an appointment to bring the Sienna back in again on Friday. That means another week of driving the kiddo back and forth to preschool (about 20-25 minutes each way) without AC. The good news is that the weather isn't supposed to be so stinkin' hot this week. The bad news is that the forecast is calling for rain every day this week, so we may not be able to cruise around with the windows open as we have been. Let's hope that Friday does the trick and the van is fixed once and for all!!

So anyhow, back to our day today. The kiddo woke up at four this morning, but went back to bed with a little coaxing before getting up for real at six. I got up with her so Hubby could sleep in, which he did until about 7:30. (Sadly, that counts as sleeping late in this house. Pathetic - I recall when "sleeping late" meant not being awake before noon...) Hubby actually requested ties for Father's Day, and the kiddo and I duly obliged and got him three new ones for his collection. The kiddo has surprisingly good taste in tie selection, and Hubby has received more compliments on ties that were her choices than any other. I have to give myself a wee bit of credit in this department too, though, as the one who will gently influence her choices as well as having the final say in which get purchased. This mainly comes into play when the kiddo spots a novelty tie - any novelty tie - because she has a mad, crazy passion for them. She will beg and plead and insist that Daddy would LOVE that one - the day-glo baby blue one with the flamingos and palm trees, or the one with giant lipstick smooches like Rocky Horror meets the Mary Kay lady, basically the tackier and louder the tie is, the more she thinks Daddy MUST have it. This time around, I had to dissuade her from picking the blue tie with the pink shirted, green shorts-ed lady golfers teeing off all over it. "But Daddy LOVES golf, Mommy!" Yes, true enough, and yet that isn't a tie that Daddy would ever wear in public, so it remained on the rack for some other dad's neck. (If it had been cheaper, say $5 or so, I would've gotten it - in part as payback for the Grandma Mother's Day card he let the kiddo pick out for me - but it was only marked down to $13 so no dice.) I think the kiddo would've loved growing up in the heinous, preppy fashion era of the 80s. I recall some horrible clothing, covered with worse patterns than any novelty tie, that people wore intentionally and with a straight face. My former school headmaster had a few pairs of cords covered with things like lobsters and tennis rackets that he'd frequently wear, not to mention madras slacks and pastel sweaters, and no one batted an eye. The kiddo would've LOVED those pants, as well as the wrap-around skirt I had back in seventh grade that was covered in (I kid you not) frogs.

The only thing we actually accomplished today as far as any work goes was to put up the netting that will hopefully keep the birdies away from the berries in our berry patch. Last year the netting was quite successful, but it was a ginormous PITA of a project. I put it up and removed it by myself and swore that next year, I'd get Hubby to help. So, he did, and thank goodness. When I say "ginormous PITA" I am vastly understating. That netting, yeesh, it is clingy and folds back on itself and gets tangled and can't be spread out.... essentially it is not a job for one person. Between the two of us and a few muttered curse words (the kiddo was safely out of ear's reach in the house), we hung it up in a way that I hope will make it easier for us humans to access the berries while keeping the birds out, and not get all tangled in the branches and brambles, which happened last year. The raspberries, blueberries and blackberries all look really promising in terms of buds and fruit, and while it was a bumper crop for my strawberry plants, they once again were itty bitty - hardly more than the size of a large raisin - so I left them on the plants as they ripened for the birds to eat. Which they did, with nary a "thank you" beyond a liberal splashing of bird poop along the edge of the fence in the corner where the berry patch resides.

In nesting news, all the finch babies are hatched and the end number is four. I don't know if the last egg was a dud, but when I took pictures the other day, there was still an egg left to hatch, then the next time we checked, no egg and no baby. The four that have made it seem to be healthy and thriving - they're already big enough that we can see their little beaks pointing up over the edge of the nest when looking from the window. Very cool. Mama Finch finally discovered the bird feeder I'd placed on the corner of the porch, right near her nest, and has invited every other finch in the area to join her. I counted fifteen finches (all female) on the porch and in the bushes around the porch when I peeked out the window earlier today. Finchtastic!



So, hopefully everyone out there had an equally relaxing Sunday and to all the dads out there (including my own and my hubby) - HAPPY FATHER'S DAY!!!

Baby birdie and busted AC update

The presumptive sparrow baby is no longer in the nest, so I guess I was right on his status, sadly enough. (Special thanks to Mama Finch for disposing of the corpse someplace out of sight and not just kicking it to the floor of the porch for me to find.) There is a newly hatched baby finch alongside the one that hatched yesterday, so total nest count at this point is two baby finches and three eggs yet to hatch.

Also, the problem with the Sienna's AC seems to be actually related to the work they did on it the last time. Then, they'd said the problem was one of two things (or possibly both) and at their suggestion, we had them do the lesser of the two fixes and hoped that would take care of it. Since it was the larger, more complicated and expensive issue, they are going to credit the work they did last time towards this fix, which knocks a good bit off of the still-costly bill, but they think this will take care of it once and for all. (As it should since we've now replaced just about the entire AC system...) The bad news is that they don't have the part they need on hand so we'll have to do the complicated Drop Off the Van routine again either on Friday or Saturday. The mechanic did say that he thinks we should have a few more good, problem-free years at least left on the van, given the state of everything else in it and the shape it's in, now that the AC issue will be resolved. Hope he's right!!

Eggstra, Eggstra! Read all about it!

(Wow, the eggciting terms just keep on coming. Hee!)

First, the good news - another baby birdie has hatched in the nest! The new finch baby is a lot smaller than the presumptive sparrow, as one might expect given the difference in egg sizes.



Now, the bad news - it doesn't appear that the baby sparrow has survived. It looked quite still and as though it was not breathing when I took the baskets down as they were being blown almost perpendicular in yesterday's thunderstorms. (I continue to try to disturb the nest as little as possible, so I do not touch the actual nest and am going only on brief, visual observation here.) Mama finch is still tending to/sitting on the nest, so I don't think it is a case of abandonment. Hubby speculates that perhaps once the baby finch appeared, Mama figured out the first baby was not one of hers and stopped caring for it. Who knows? (Probably some ornithologist, but we're certainly not bird experts.) All I know is, I hope that I am wrong and the sparrow chick is still alive, but if it is dead, I hope Mama finch removes it from the nest and not just to the porch floor, as happened last year. (Ick.) So, that's two eggs down, four to go!

(Side note: it cooled down during the storm front yesterday, which enabled me to turn off the central air and open the windows to air out the house. Papa Finch was most displeased with his apparently new found awareness of our cat, who had immediately planted herself in an opened upstairs window - not the window nearest the petunia baskets, mind you. He perched on the roof about 3 feet away from where she was sunning herself and minding her own business and cheeped at her quite angrily. She looked at me with this "Huh?!? What did I do?" expression and after a few more minutes of him cheeping, she hopped down out of the windowsill and stalked off into the back of the house, away from Papa finch. After she left the window, he stopped cheeping and flew away.)

(egg) Breaking News!!!

I just took down the petunia baskets to water them, as they're quite droopy between the sun and the brisk, hot breeze, and look who decided to pop out:



This is the baby out of the presumptive sparrow egg, (as you can see) the five matching, smaller eggs are still intact. Mama Finch was super ticked at my disruption of her motherly duties - I watered as fast (yet carefully) as I could and rehung the basket while she cheeped and cheeped at me. She went back to the nest as soon as I'd closed the front door behind me. I'm guessing we'll have more babies in the next couple of days, as the egg that hatched today wasn't the first one laid. Woo-hoo! (Also, I haven't seen the sparrow hanging around in the past couple of days, either in the front near the nest or in the back yard, where this year's birdfeeder frequenters are eating us out of house and home, or at least out of gigantic bags of seed.)

In other nature and wildlife-related news, yesterday after church I was mowing the lawn when, in the back yard along the back of the kiddo's sandbox, I came across this:



It's about two feet long, and isn't a complete specimen. I skeeved Hubby out by picking it up with my bare hands and bringing it inside to show him and the kiddo. (The kiddo who promptly requested to bring it in to school today to show to her class, which she did with great excitement this morning.) Once it was safely contained in a gallon-sized baggie and my hands had been thoroughly washed, Hubby was more inclined to inspect the snake skin. Now, we've only ever seen garter snakes around our little piece o' property, and the largest of those that we've ever spotted was maybe a foot long. Neither of us believe this came from a garter snake, and I have no idea what kind of snake it belonged to before it was shed. Here's a close-up of the skin in case there are any herpetology enthusiasts out there who might be able to identify it.




I was thinking of taking it (with the kiddo) to the zoo and seeing if anyone there might know, but with the AC issue (as described in painful detail in my previous post) I didn't want to do any extra driving today. Let's hope that whatever type of snake it is, its diet consists primarily of many, many voles and that if so, s/he sticks around for the rest of the summer. It'd be awfully nice to be vole-free, especially without having to resort to placing boxes of rodent poison way under the deck (well out of any human or feline's reach) as we've had to do a few times in previous years when the vole infestation has been particularly prolific.

We're positively brimming with wildlife 'round here! Between the birdies, the snake, the toad I almost ran over with the mower, Bunny Foo-Foo (who has munched a good portion of this year's food garden, now replanted and surrounded by organic Keep-Bunny-Away granules), the vole community under the deck and the geese, ducks, herons, deer, muskrats and what appears to be a beaver family in the pond out behind our back yard, well, call up the ghost of Marlin Perkins and have him bring a camera crew on over!

Slip 'n Sliding away

It was hot here today. Really, really hot. Also really, really humid. These two factors combine to affect the Smith Chicks' hair in very different ways. When it is the least bit humid out, the kiddo's hair goes into these ringlet curls - the same curls I have actually paid hair stylists to put in for fancy updo styles, you know, those delicate, curly tendrils that frame one's face oh-so-romantically - and it is absolutely adorable on her. Me, on the other hand? All the humidity and heat do to my Wolverine van Beethoven (now slightly longer but still very, very layered and not nearly long enough to be out of the awkward stage) is make it even larger and more feathered. I guess it is now less Wolverine van Beethoven than Wolverine Fawcett, because it is trying like heck to feather itself all over my head.


Proof right here: (and kindly ignore the glistening and pink cheeks; it was hot and I'd just come in from the gym...)



Yes, you can take the girl out of Jersey, but you'll never take the Jersey out of her hair! I spent a good 20 minutes after my post-gym shower wielding spray gel, "texturizing" spray, anti-frizz goop and hairspray to get the volume to come down on top of my head. Also to get it to come in somewhat on the sides. A daunting task - it made me actually ponder buying a flat iron, but my forehead and ears remember all too well the burns left upon them back in the Scary Curling Iron days of my youth (when you'd fill the barrels with water, then push the end as you were curling so steam would come out, remember? Water + electricity + very close proximity to one's head = brilliant plan...) and so I think I'm going to tough it out a little longer. It can't stay this length forever, right?


So anyhow, it was hot today. The kiddo is mostly recovered from her pneumonia (we saw the doctor this afternoon, who said her lungs are sounding pretty good. Go Zithromax! Woot!) and was feeling antsy after spending most of the week in a very low-key, recovering-from-pneumonia manner. It seemed a fitting time, therefore, to break out one of her recently received birthday presents - a Slip 'n Slide. Now, when I was a kid, we never had a Slip 'n Slide. I didn't even have any friends who owned a Slip 'n Slide, so I never in my life have slipped 'n slid. It was always something that looked like sooooo much fun that I think a little piece of me always felt like my summers were never complete for not having had the Slip 'n Slide experience. Hubby reports the same, sad childhood tale of being utterly deprived of ever having played on a Slip 'n Slide, so the kiddo is the first member of our immediate family to be lucky enough to do so, and on one of her very own to boot! She was begging both of us to go with her, but the very scary warning printed right at the start of the plastic convinced any part of me that was still longing to try it, even just once, that I'm about 30 years too late (and several pounds too heavy) for that. Bummer.


Now, it seems from our (admittedly hazy) recollections from back in the day that the Slip 'n Slide engineering has greatly improved over the decades. What Hubby and I recall was little more than a long strip of plastic that those fortunate children who owned one would complain about tearing and getting punctured very easily. Now, it has a bumper-surrounded catching area at the end, as well as a row of pretty serious sprinklers down the side (which we didn't remember being a feature back in the 70s, but may've in fact been. Like I said, we were both deprived. I seem to remember it just being wet by the hose, but no arcing sprinkler action.)

While I was inside liberally slathering sunscreen on the kiddo, Hubby set up the Slip 'n Slide, angling it along the natural slope of our back yard and checking the underside area for sharp and/or pointy things. As our grass is presently in need of a trim, I think there was more cushioning than there otherwise might've been between the plastic and our hard, hard clay soil, so not a bad thing. Having it head downhill also helped improve the kiddo's sliding potential, of course. She couldn't wait to get sliding. Unfortunately, she really didn't want to attempt a running leap-belly flop combination (as we remember from the TV commercials of our youth), so she mostly just got a running start several yards back on the lawn, then continued running once she reached the plastic until she lost her footing and then slid the rest of the way on her behind/back. This was rather hilarious to watch (as evidenced by my giggling and inability to speak in a normal tone of voice from said giggling while trying out our new video camera) and didn't deter her from repeatedly doing the "run until she fell" maneuver, despite a few rather hard landings. I have a feeling she's going to have a sore behind in the morning...


The biggest downside to any water-related activity in our back yard is the lack of hot water capability. I suppose we could run the hose into the house through the window above the kitchen sink and hook it up to some warmer water courtesy of the kitchen tap, but we never have. Every pool, sprinkler and now Slip 'n Slide we've done has featured icy cold water straight from the outside faucet. This means that despite the great amounts of fun one is having and the incredible heat one may be outdoors in at the time, one's teeth eventually start chattering and one's Mean Mommy pulls the plug on the activity in favor of drying off and warming up. This is especially the case when one is recovering from pneumonia, so the Slip 'n Sliding was cut shorter than the kiddo may've liked. Good thing we're heading to the water park tomorrow, which is set to be another scorchingly hot and humid day!


(Oh, a quick petunia basket nest update: Mama Finch is still sitting on the nest, which still features 6 unhatched eggs, which as of this morning's plant watering were all standing on end. Do eggs turn upright as the baby is getting ready to hatch all on their own? Does the mama bird turn them? Will we have baby birdies soon? Stay tuned......)

(Oh, and a PPS - don't know if anyone noticed or not, but I'm not wearing my glasses in the picture above because I was wearing contacts today. Woo! Contacts! My "one month per eye" supply came in yesterday, and now I'm going to have to begin seriously exercising the restraint I promised myself I would in order to make that "one month" stretch out to three or four months, at least. It is too darn expensive to wear contacts every day at the price I have to pay for these. Though I will wear them tomorrow, since we're going to the amusement park......)

(Last PS for this post, I swear. I just spellchecked, as I somehow have a mental block on how to spell the word exercise - oh, the irony - and the spell check indicated that "scorchingly" is not a word. It gave me the option of "scorching" instead, which has me wondering - why isn't "scorchingly" a word? Is it a word and blogger spell check just doesn't get it? Hmmm.)

As the petunia basket turns...

Okay, I spent a lot of time yesterday afternoon stalking and trying to get a picture of Mama bird, and I am now certain that the sparrow I caught at the bird feeder is not the bird that is sitting on the nest.

Unfortunately, this is the best shot I could get of Mama on the nest. I had to take it from inside the house with the window closed, because if I do anything else, even just try to photograph her through the open window, she flies away and gets really irked - cheeping and cheeping from what she deems a safe distance. Apparently Mama bird isn't yet ready for her close-up...




If I had CSI or Law & Order technology, I could put that shot into some computer program and with a few keystrokes, be able to "enhance" it to the point where we could see every detail of her smallest feather and probably even do a DNA analysis, but I am a mere mortal with a not-terribly-fancy digital camera and not-very-advanced PhotoShop skills. I also tried to catch a shot of Mama bird after she had flown away and landed on the neighbor's roof:





Based on these two pictures and the fact that Papa bird defintely resembles the house finch picture I found online, I'm feeling pretty sure that (a) the Mama and Papa are both house finches - though that one, larger egg doesn't appear to be (see Nora's comments in the post below, and thanks Nora for your sleuthing!) and (b) at this point, the house finches are still in control of the nest. I have noticed sparrows in the general area, and given last year's similar egg configuration in the nest, I'm guessing that the bad end to the baby birdies last year was due to the sparrow ultimately taking over the nest. Evil sparrow.

We're not going anywhere today as the kiddo has brewed up her first batch of 5 year old germies (nasty, wet cough, Niagara Falls nostrils and most worryingly, a fever of almost 103 this morning) unless we head over to the pediatrician for a "listen to the lungs" check, and it is pouring rain out, so I'm guessing Mama bird will stick close to the nest. I am going to try to get a better picture of her, and if I do, I'll post it. Also, if the weather worsens, I'll have to take down the baskets (so they don't blow over) and if I do, I'll take a picture of any egg-hatching developments. I didn't take the basket down yesterday as I'm trying to disturb it as little as possible. Stay tuned for further chapters of As the Petunia Basket Turns...........

Eggciting update...

The petunia basket nest is up to SIX eggs!

I've been trying to surreptitiously snap a photo of Mama Bird on her nest, but she is awfully camera-shy. I did, however, get this shot of her (from a distance and stretching the zoom function of my digital camera to its maximum capability) as she dined at one of our backyard feeders. Well, I'm 99.9% certain it is Mama Bird - she flew out of the basket and over the house, and I raced back there to find this one bird stopping at the feeder.

Do the bird-expert blog readers out there still think this is a house finch family, based upon the pics of the nest and the presumed Mama Bird? Anyone? Bueller? I just wonder at the one, much larger egg in the nest with all the other smaller, more uniform-looking eggs...

I think we have a winner!

I believe Diane is correct in her comment on my previous birdtastic post! I just googled House Finches and here's what Cornell's Ornithology Department page about them says:

"A bright red and brown-striped bird of the cities and suburbs, the House Finch comes readily to feeders. It also breeds in close association with people, and often chooses a hanging plant in which to put its nest."

Now, the pictures on the page aren't an exact match for the birds as I've observed them through the window, but certainly are close enough, as are the eggs. So, unless someone can definitively state otherwise, House Finches they are!

Thanks, Diane!

For the birds

Every spring, I hang baskets of petunias on our front porch. Last year, some of the local wildlife took an interest, as I discovered when I took the baskets down for their watering one afternoon and found a bird's nest nestled among the petunias. The kiddo and I watched as eventually, three eggs were laid in the nest, then one was pushed out and broke on the porch floor, then another egg replaced it. There was a lot of commotion in and around the basket and porch roof, which we tried to spy upon from inside the house as much as we could. Eventually, the three eggs hatched and there were three baby birds, much to our delight. Unfortunately, when the babies were in their second year of life, we came home from a road trip to discover them all dead (and icky). We don't know what transpired, as we were away, but it was a sad ending. (I will confess that I did not use the babies' demise as a teaching moment in the "circle of life" theme with the kiddo, then aged just 4. I lied and told her the babies must've flown away. Bad mommy, I know.)

I tried very hard not to disturb the nest last year. I'd only take the basket down when necessary for watering, and I took great care to water around the nest and leave it undisturbed. The mama bird came and went throughout that period, so I don't think she abandoned the eggs/babies because of human interference, especially since the babies "flew away" while we were out of town.

Well, Mother's Day weekend I bought my petunia baskets and hung them up once again. This past Sunday, I took the baskets down to water them and found a nest in the same basket! There were no eggs in it at that point, but when I took the baskets down this afternoon for watering, look at what I found:


I also tried to snap a picture of the mama and daddy bird, who perched on the next-door neighbors' roof and were cheeping ferociously at me until I re-hung the basket and went back inside.


Does anyone out there know what the heck kind of birds these are? I tried to figure it out online last year, but didn't come up with anything definitive. They frequent our backyard bird feeders, and I'm almost 100% positive they're the same birds from last year. The eggs are also the same - two smaller, less speckly ones and one much larger, super-speckled egg. Last year, we were guessing that some type of usurper bird was trying to horn in on the nest with her egg (in a cuckoo bird sort of way) and that was the cause of all the ruckus we'd hear out on the porch, the birds fighting over the nest. But a second year in a row? Hmmm, now we're not so sure. Hubby suggested that perhaps the majority of mama bird's egg-creating energy went into the big egg, and the others were sort of "runts of the litter" - or would that be a clutch? Anyhow, we'll now be monitoring this year's nest situation, once again as unobtrusively as possible (I will not sacrifice my flowers for the nest, so I will continue to water around it) and hopefully this year's eggies turn into birdies that actually do fly away this summer!