Summer Challenges

1.  To school or not to school?  
I'm not typically a year-round home-schooler.  Our summer schedules (see #2) don't usually lend themselves to it.  However, I need to get Z back in the home-school groove somehow, and E needs to press on in math.  
2.  One child with 3 mornings of gymnastics scheduled; one with 3 afternoons!  
3.  I promised myself that I would not commit to anything this summer other than one week of VBS.  No basketball camps, swimming lessons, dance class, art camp, or whatever looks too good to pass up; I'm passing.  

This one has already posed a challenge to my "try it all" spirit.  But so far, so true.  I want to be able to say "yes" to impromptu times with friends.  I want to take a day to drive to the beach without feeling bad about what we paid for that we're missing.  I don't want the summer to pass us by this year!

4.  Reading.  Most summers I offer the kids some kind of reading challenge.  They read X number of books, I'll get them the Y they've wanted.  

This year, I decided to make it monetary (don't judge).  For every 100 pages read they earn $2 up to 500 pages.  For every 100 pages after 500, they get $3 for 600 to 1000 pages.  If they pass 1000, they get $4 for every 100 pages.  My husband actually thinks I'm being cheap.  I was just going to make it $2 for every 100 pages period.  But I compromised with the sliding scale. 
5.  Our dear friends and former neighbors are moving to Boston!  

Make Way For Ducklings

Nope.  This isn't about that wonderful story by Robert McCloskey.  This is about real ducklings in our neighborhood. 
Last week, as E and I were driving home from Z's school, I thought I saw turtle heads in our neighborhood pond.  So, we pulled over to take a look.  However, they were not turtles but two teeny, tiny, baby ducks.  Chirping away.  Wait a minute!

Where's your mama?  You're too little to be here by yourselves.  We looked just hard enough to find that mama had been killed by a coyote?  Oh, and what do you know?  There are your brothers and sisters under a bush. 

  And more of them over here.

 Oh man!  And unhatched eggs.

Now, you know my stuffed animal lover was not going to just walk away and trust nature's course.  Sooo, home we go to call the zoo and other places to find out what to do with the little homeless guys.
Turns out, no-one officially cares for needy birds in our county.  The best advice I got was to feed them some chick food for a day, see if another mama comes for them, then take them to Auburn University's emergency animal clinic.  
Sooo, off to Tractor Supply for a rather large bag of chick food.  Oh, in the meantime, I have to pick up Z from school and take him to the doctor for a possible fractured finger.  The 2 hour wait was practically torture for my girl.

By lunchtime, I'd decided to just rescue the little guys and drive the hour to Auburn.  I was afraid they wouldn't survive being probably a day old.  When we got there, though, they were gone!  It turned out some workers there found them and took them to the zoo (which wouldn't take them from me, but he apparently knew somebody there).  Sad but relieved, we check the pond to make sure he got all of them. 
Nope.  Those two pond ducklings are still there.  It seems they don't know how to get out and they won't come to the bank if we're within 30 feet.  Great!  Now what?

Followed us pathetically!  The worker who found them said they were in the parking lot, which is where they followed us to, practically trying to get in our car!

We have gymnastics, that's what.  While there, I tell my friend what is going on and she suggested someone in our home-school group who already has ducks, rabbits and other critters.  
By 6:30 p.m. those ducklings had been in the water at least 10 hours that we know of, probably much longer.  Darlene and her family came with a long-poled net to scoop up the little guys and take them home!  Whew!  
More than that, praise God!  Oh, yes. We prayed for them.  And you know what?  I saw Him.  Darlene's husband managed to scoop the ducklings out of the water when it was almost too dark to see them any more.  He said the fish in the water were already trying to get to them.

Look how small they are in the pond.  And, though they're hard to see in this picture, there are a couple of male mallards swimming in the same pond.  They were useless!  Couldn't have cared less about the  motherless newborns. 

And not 30 minutes after they went to their new home, we had a huge thunderstorm that I'm sure would have drowned them.  I don't know how they survived an earlier rain storm that day.  Oh, yes I do!
I love happy endings.  Well, not as happy for E as she'd have liked.  "Why can't we take them home?"  I guess now I have to learn how to care  for ducklings in case this ever happens again, don't I?