Mother's Day Surprise!

Last night Bruce said, "I have a goal to get all the Christmas decorations down before Mother's Day."

We have had a large wreath, with a big, red bow, hanging over our garage door since November 25 last year. The bow has been blown by the wind and weather and was getting a little scraggly-looking. The neighbors have noticed: Brother Bennett told Jason, "The next time I come to your house, that wreath had better be down." And Sister Thompson told Lindsey, "Your house is easy to find—it's the one with the Christmas wreath on the garage!"

Neighbors' comments aside, it seemed kind of dumb to still have our Christmas wreath up on the house. So I thought Bruce's goal was terrific! He went out to take care of it, and I got to work in the kitchen and promptly forgot about what he was doing.

After a little while, Bruce came back in the house and said, "Guess what I found?" Something about his countenance made me think it might not be good—I thought maybe he'd found some long-lost, and now moldy or rotten, former treasure in the garage. So I warily asked, "What?"

He found, after he took down the wreath, that there was a nest with two or three baby birds in it! Oh dear. "What should we do?" he asked. Well, we both knew the only thing to do was to put the wreath back up and hope the mother bird would go back to her babies. But before he did that I wanted to go out and see the nest and the babies. (I also figured that before we put the wreath back, I would at least cut the scraggly bow off of it.) As I was going out the front door I saw Abbi slowly moving, in stalking mode. "Abbi!" I said in a menacing voice, and she ran away (and then avoided me for the rest of the night). Bruce held up the wreath for me to see our babies: little, tiny birds with their grown-up feathers coming in. Awwwww!


Then Bruce went back up the ladder to hang up our Mother's Day wreath. Will mama bird come back and keep caring for her babies? Oh, I hope so!