Wildlife

Today, Adam took the kids downtown to run some errands. Before they headed out, Adam told the kids, "We are going to the kitchen store and the candy store. If you are good, you can pick out a treat at the kitchen store OR the candy store, but not both. All right?" The kids agreed to these terms.

The kids were good at the kitchen store, but decided they wanted to pick their treat at the candy store (as Miranda put it, "If I get a treat here, it will just be chocolate anyway, so I might as well pick something at the candy store.") When they arrived at the candy store, Xavier immediately selected a jaw-breaker the size of a baseball.

"Xavier, how are you going to eat that?" my husband asked.

"I don't know."

"Honey," my husband went on, "it is too big to even fit in your mouth."

Xavier pondered this. "Maybe an elephant could eat it."

My husband persuaded him that, since we did not actually have an elephant, perhaps he should pick something else, which he did.


This afternoon, I took the kids to a local National Forest park where we like to go hiking. There is a boardwalk that goes over a swamp there, and there is an observation area about midway across the boardwalk that the kids like to eat a picnic snack on. As we were headed for the snack area, we attracted the attention of a number of Canada geese that live in the swamp, along with their goslings. The goslings were all in various states of development, from fuzzy, duck-like creatures to goslings with the distinctive Canada markings but without the size (as I told my friend, they looked like "Canada ducks."

As the kids started their snacks, it became readily clear that these Canada geese were used to handouts, because the fuzzy goslings swam down below the observation deck and looked up expectantly at Xavier. Xavier was fascinated by them, but did not feed them because I wouldn't let him. Finally the goslings gave up and turned to swim away. Xavier waved good-bye to them -- and they swung back around and resumed their post underneath the deck (clearly thinking that he was throwing food to them.)

After a few repetitions of this process, Xavier figured it out, and just started waving frantically at the goslings to keep them nearby, while the goslings bobbed their heads furiously, trying to figure out where he was throwing his food. In the end, Xavier never did finish his snack.


That was probably the high point of the trip, although we also saw a deer in the parking lot, a turtle and many, many fish in the water, a frog, and we even had the excitement of a bee in the car on the way home. When Adam asked the kids what they saw, though, they immediately chorused, "Sea shells!" because there were fresh-water mollusks in lake. It's amazing what sticks in their brains.