Tuppence A Bag

My baby sister Elizabeth came to visit me this last weekend. It was a wonderful surprise and so much fun to have her here. She brought along my niece Aspen (Rose's daughter) so she could see McKenna. They are very best friends. It was thrilling to see McKenna and Evan's reaction when Aspen showed up at the door. I didn't tell them that she was coming. It was priceless!

One of the things that I wanted to do with all the kids while we had company here was feed the ducks. The very first winter that we spent down here in Texas I commented to Ryan that the birds seem to hang around. They didn't fly South for the winter. Then it occurred to me that we are South. This is where the birds fly to. So every winter we like to go to the ponds around town and feed the ducks and geese. We have a bread outlet store in town that will sell a garbage bag full of old loaves for $2.50. Our bag contained 12 loaves of bread. 

We started out on the sunny side of the pond. Once we started throwing bread in the water the birds soon came over. They know the drill.

 

Evan was our one casualty. We were only there for 15 minutes before he managed to slip off the edge into the water. Thankfully he landed on his feet and the water wasn't very deep. He screamed like crazy until Boo pulled him up the bank. He was so sure that the geese were on their way to eat him. I was very nervous about Alana but she was pretty scared too and stayed clear of the edge all on her own.

There was a group of five very large geese that came over to us from across the pond. They were very aggressive and all the other birds cleared out of the way and stayed back until these geese had their fill. They were not scared of us at all and gladly ate out of our hands.

Alana enjoyed breaking up the bread and throwing it. She couldn't throw very far and usually managed to miss the water altogether. She didn't seem to care.

We managed to lose a pair of sunglasses, a bag of bread, and a toy baby bottle into the water. We recovered the glasses and bread but the toy floated away.

                               

After a while we moved over to the shady side of the pond. We decided that the birds over there looked hungry as well. They didn't disappoint. We found one bird that was missing all his wing feathers. We felt so bad for him that he got extra helpings.

We worked through all twelve loaves of bread and the kids really had a blast. I thought they would get bored but it really was fun watching the ducks fight over the bread.

As I was typing this up I realized that this is one more thing that I am really going to miss when we move away from here. The next year-and-a-half will go by fast (as time does) and it's getting harder to think about leaving. Still exciting, but I'm getting pretty attached to this place and all it has to offer.