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Day Three: The Duck Pond Fiasco
NaBloPoMo Day Three
I was ready to post letters tonight but somehow, magically at the stroke of nine p.m., I became incredibly tired. I hate it when this happens. At least I didn’t fall asleep putting Baby Bug to bed. I do that all the time and then I get nothing done. It’s pathetic though. I drank a whole cup of coffee at five and I swear I could fall asleep in less than seven minutes if I put my head down right now.
Maybe I’m tired today because I spent a marathon three hours at the Duck Pond with Baby Bug. It sounds like fun, right? Nice weather, ducks, water, a park, a fun kid… what could go wrong?
A mom who is paranoid that her kid is going to topple over head first into the pond, is what could go wrong. Baby Bug is not known for her steadiness on her feet and she falls head first at home all the time without a pond. I was just waiting for it to happen and I think my shoulders are a mass of knotted muscles because of it.
I had told Toby how much fun Baby Bug has been having lately when we go on walks together. Actually, to be completely honest, I was complaining about how getting anywhere takes a million years because she has to examine every rock, stick and leaf. And then when she does finally catch up to me, she often decides she wants to go back the other way and I spend a lot of time calling her to hurry up and stay by mommy.
Toddlers are toddlers and they will do what they do. I’m learning the hard way that if you force them to do things your way (ie: walk forward in a straight line) they will buckle and balk, scream and yell, twist and shout in every imaginable combination until your eyeballs roll back in your head and you are convinced that letting them win just this one battle will not be the end of the world.
Sigh. It makes me very tired. I think I spent half of today holding her wiggling body as tight as I could so that she didn’t expel herself off of me and land headfirst on the concrete. Kicking, wiggling, pushing herself away… you name it. It is amazing what a little twenty-pound body and a will of steel can do. I don’t think I could get a better work out if I took three spinning classes back to back.
I want to say the duck pond was fun. It was really pretty (green algae and all) but it was so much work. I don’t think I’ll be going back anytime soon. It didn’t help that I misplaced my phone and we spent an hour looking for it with Baby Bug struggling against me. I tried carrying her in my arms, I carried her upside down, I put her on my shoulders. It was just impossible.
I would have strapped her into the stroller but Toby and I had the bright idea that I should leave the stroller at home so Baby Bug could “be free to roam and explore”. Obviously, I wasn’t thinking about the great big body of green water that she could fall into. Nor was I thinking about her will power of steel. A “walk in the park” was anything but a “walk in the park.”
It’s not like she would drown. The pond is only a few feet deep. But still, I just didn’t really want to go sloshing in to save her. With the mud and wet clothes and the probability that she would go head first… it all seemed like a bad idea to me.
In the end, I won’t say it was a complete bust. She didn’t fall in the water and I got a bunch of pictures. As a reward, I think we both will sleep really good tonight. All’s well that end’s well, right? Just don’t ask me to go to the duck pond until Baby Bug learns to swim.
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Passing on our crazy obsession with birds
This post is for Toby. He has been asking me twice a day if I wrote it yet. So now I feel extremely bad that I don’t have all that much to write about. But if you look through my flickr set, you’ll see that I did make quite an effort to try to be more funny with my titles and descriptions. Being funny is hard work. It’s a good thing I can draw because I suck at the funny blogging gig.
We went to the Magnolia Bird Farm on Saturday. It was a case of me begging Toby, “Please please take us somewhere. We are so very bored of this house and I can’t think of any adventures that don’t involve the mall and shopping.” I didn’t actually beg but I think Toby could hear me through my desperate looking eyes. I take Baby Bug all over the place but sometimes, I just need to get out with another adult.
The Bird Farm was a total hoot with Baby Bug. Last time we took her she was too little and didn’t really care much. This time it was like what taking her to the zoo should have been. She loved looking at all the birds. (At least they were awake, unlike all the animals at the Zoo). We explored for hours. I’m sure a lot of that exploring was her exploring the poop encrustment on the cages but I can’t do anything about that. Let’s just hope none of us come down with any bird flu viruses.
The actual reason we went to The Bird Farm was to trade in two of our very very noisy finches. Sadly, we had to let Mel go. We’ve had him for ages but he was way too noisy. I love that bird but he had to go. I kind of feel bad that I didn’t give him a proper goodbye but I think finches only have a three second memory so he probably forgave me. He’s probably thinking, “Hot Dog! Look at all the hot women in here!”
I got Mel way back in the beginning to be a friend to Bridgeet, my first finch. Bridgeet was a female zebra finch. All white and cute as a button. A woman at work gave her to me because she had to get rid of her because she was too noisy. (Bridgeet, not the woman at work). Little did I know, that little white bird was the beginning of our crazy bird hobby. Toby’s always loved birds but getting a finch was permission to take his bird watching hobby to a whole new level.
Then we built the bird aviary. Hmmmmm… I have pictures of it somewhere. Probably in my old archives that are GONE. Too bad because our aviary is really cool. If Toby’s office wasn’t always such a mess (and I didn’t have this aversion to showing off messes), I’d go take a picture of it. It’s huge and in our house. Just like a Zoo! In our house!
We are the crazy bird people!
Shortly after acquiring Bridgeet (and then Mel to keep her company) we started collecting more and more finches. (They are like candy except you can’t eat them and they tweet!) We had spice finches for a while but they kept having babies and that got out of control. So over the years, we’ve narrowed our collection down to mostly just waxbills. This is probably boring to 99 percent of the people who might read this but there’s going to be one person who knows exactly what a waxbill is and this paragraph is ALL FOR YOU!
Bridgeet died a while back (she was old) and ever since, Mel has been a screeching lunatic bird. It could be because he misses Bridgeet or it could be because he just is a crazy lunatic bird. The bird aviary is in Toby’s office and in order to work, and get stuff done, Toby has resorted to squirting Mel with a squirt bottle full of water to get him to shut up. It’s really sad. Mel has had more than his fair share of baths.
The rest of the birds have suffered too because when Mel gets squirted, he sends the whole aviary into a tither. It was time for him to go. We didn’t want to do it because who knows if somebody will buy him and put him in a very very small cage in a dark dorm room or something, but he had to go. Hopefully, he’ll get to live out the rest of his days at the bird farm with a zillion new hot girlfriends.
So this is my goodbye post to Mel. And also a post about how we hope to pass on our love of birds to Baby Bug, so people can make fun of her too.
