My Aviary

We were outside swinging and making up funny songs this afternoon. It's a beautiful day. You know, the kind of day that it is surely a sin to be indoors. Elijah loves to swing in the baby swing. I think he would stay out there for hours if someone would stay there and push him. The other kids were respectively on their swings and we were singing this song:

It's fun to swing,
While we sing,
In the spring.

We jump up high,
In the sky,
It's like we fly!!!

Our rhyming really went downhill after that, so I'll just write the good verses here.

As you can see, we're quite the song writers. If we could find someone to sing them, I'm sure we would be famous.....

 Rylie, who really loves to write things down, ran inside to grab her notebook so we could remember our song. I had just spun Zack on his swing and he was screaming bloody murder as he was holding on to the bottom of the swing spinning furiously. All of the sudden Rylie began screaming also. "Mom!!!!! There's a bird in our house!!!!!" she squealed. Now I had two children screaming. We live in a retirement neighborhood and our neighbors just LOVE us..... I was just beginning to think that maybe Zack needed rescued when I ditched him to check out the aviary that used to be my house.

I reached the house in time to see a cute little bird flying around my family room. My first thought was, "birds can't control their colons, it's going to poop all over my house!!" My second thought was, "How are we going to chase it out without touching it?" (I'm deathly afraid of mites and diseases.) As the rest of the kids trailed in, the bird flew off into the other part of the house. Out of fear I'm sure.

I then began to squeal. Loudly and frequently. My fear of diseases and mites was escalating with every squeal. And NOW this bird was SOMEWHERE in my house spreading disease. (And most likely pooping.)

I hollered at the kids to go down the hall, find the bird, chase it towards the front of the house, and close all the bedroom doors! While they were doing that I went to prop the front door open so it could fly out. As I was opening the door, Rylie came in and informed me that I almost stepped on the poor little bird. At that message I started jumping around and squealing all over again at the mere thought of squishing a little bird between my toes.

It was lying there looking quite dead. I assumed there were two possible reasons for this. 1. We scared it to death with all our squealing (OK, my squealing.) and running around like madmen. 2. It hit the window trying desperately to escape the madmen and stunned itself. We're going with option 2.

Now we had a couple of problems. We have a cat who is an avid hunter. She's quite fat right now though and prefers slow animals. A stunned bird is very slow. I was sure she would eat her. The other problem was how to get it outside without spreading diseases and mites by touching it.

I fixed the first problem by locking the fat hunter in the garage. Zack fixed the second problem by using Dan's shoe to scoot the bird out the door.

Now my last problem is how to keep Dan from reading this post as he is constantly telling us to CLOSE the back door.........smile.....