Rehabilitation for Ford

Yesterday and today were filled with excitement around here. Yesterday, Friday, we somehow picked up a fledgling crow in the undercarriage of our car. We were driving along and I kept waiting for the bird in the road in front of us to fly out of the way at the last minute... except he didn't. I did my best to straddle him with the wheels of my car and had my fingers crossed that I didn't run him over. I didn't. He disappeared! When I looked in the rear view mirror the road was completely empty. Several miles later we blew out a tire (in an unrelated incident) and had to wait over an hour for roadside assistance to change the tire. In all that time, the bird never made a peep but he must have been under the car the whole time. As we came out of the house to get Natalie from school I kept hearing chirping... really really close by chirping. And I was saying to the children, doesn't that sound like a bird is in our car? As I walked around the car I saw that he was stuck in the grill above the front bumper and by the license plate. So I called the local nature center and asked if it was okay for me to touch the bird and try to get him out. Andy said yes and I should call back if he had trouble flying and they would get me the phone number of a rescue volunteer. After I got the crow out of the car he tried to fly away but only went about 5 inches and fell back down to the ground. Fuzzy grey thing with fluff on top of his head and a yellow beak. Large for a young bird. Anyway, we put him in the dog crate at first because we had to get Natalie pronto but when we came home he had gotten out and was sitting on a window sill chirping. So we went to the pet store and got a cage to keep him in for overnight until I could get him to rehab. We named him Ford in honor of the Ford Windstar in which he was found. :-)

The bird went right to sleep when it got dark but woke up as soon as it got light -- whee!!! Chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp. I explained to the children that it is not okay to keep wild things as pets, that usually they are miserable (which they learned from our Old Mr. Toad experience last spring) and so they understood that we had to take him to rehab and we agreed to get a parakeet. Golly, we already had the cage so why not. And a new pet might take some of the sting out of having to move (house is being foreclosed upon due to my darling ex stopping all mortgage payments unbeknownst to me). So this morning we visited Mr. Dave who showed us his rescue animals and explained to the children that we had found a fledgling crow who in fact wasn't injured at all, so that was good news. He gave us lots of advice about parakeets which was handy to have since this is my first bird. We also got to see him feed infant birds with an eyedropper. Every 15 minutes around the clock!!! (Luckily, they sleep at night.) We cleaned the cage and disinfected it and then headed up to parakeet shop. I chose a quiet reserved but beautiful sky blue parakeet with white clouds on her and we named her Skye. Her actual name is Blue Skye Blue Ford. Blue Skye is her first name. Blue is her middle name. And Ford is her last name, in honor of the crow who started it all. You can tell that naming her was a group effort.

After Skye got settled into her new cage and we had done some unpacking in the little cabin (we are spending the next three weeks at a beach cabin on the Ches. Bay -- the children think it is a summer vacation special treat) we went to the Bluegrass in the Park festival in Cheltenham which cost a fortune and wasn't very nice. It was $20 to get in and $24 for lunch. We were still hungry after lunch, didn't have anywhere to sit to listen to the music, and had to leave early because the girls got overheated and Leah had a tick on her neck which she pitched a huge screaming fit about when the first aid people tried to remove it. She isn't keen on having strangers in her personal space. After that debacle we calmed her down a bit, checked out the classic cars (one of my interests) and went to get our CSA farm pickup, then rested a bit at the cabin and went down to South Beach for a Mem. Day cookout. My girls don't like meat so they each chose to have a plain hamburger bun with cheese on it and some tomato slices. Rebecca discovered that when you kick sand into your food it doesn't taste very nice later on. Their grandfather showed up so we got to see him a bit and then Rebecca stumbled while she was standing in ankle deep water and fell over into the Bay and so I rescued her and we were all wet and cold and we headed straight home to get her dry and warmed up. The two older ones were very disappointed that we couldn't stay for the marshmallow roast and s'mores extravaganza but I told them we had a copper firepit, which we do, and we can roast marshmallows at another time and Becca's health was more important.

So this is our first night in the little cabin and although my cell phone doesn't get reception here I can just barely get onto the internet if I sit right by the window :-) so I will probably move the dining room table over to the window tomorrow morning so I can work on the summer camps curriculum planning some more. Farming & Gardening is the first one I am knocking out in detail and I purchased our plants already. We are going to have a regular raised bed rectangular vegetable garden and a separate circular pizza garden with the tomatoes and herbs. For housebuilding we will make a greenhouse cover for the rectangular bed which can be removed and used as a small playhouse on the playground and a cob bench at the entrance to the nature walk (apparently, there is a large deposit of very clay rich soil there so it will be perfect for us, plus it is sheltered from the weather).