Chicks and Geese and Ducks and Penguins

Ellie is asleep in her bucket (seriously, hospitals stick babies in rubbermaid tubs.  I’m sure that’s safe sleep), so I’m going to take this opportunity to catch up on some of the blogging that I should have been doing last week instead of tearing around doing fun things so that Margaret could enjoy her last week of being an only child.  Of course, most of the subject matter of this post is the stuff that we were doing for fun, so if I hadn’t been tearing around, I wouldn’t have had anything to post about, so there’s a bit of a conundrum there.*

Anyway, one of the things that Margaret really likes is going and feeding ducks and geese in Forest Park.  On a really cold day (of which there have been none, really, in the last week or so) she will settle for looking at geese and ducks out the car window.  But she prefers to feed them.  Actually, what she prefers is for Mommy to feed them while she munches away on her own piece of slightly stale duck bread.

She has also learned, thanks to a helpful book on barnyard animals, to distinguish mommy and daddy and baby ducks, which is very cute.  She, as nature intended, seems to think that the daddy ducks are more interesting.  Or at least she talks about them more.  Except that we went on the carousel at the zoo, and she rode on a goose figure that she rather thought was a mommy duck.  So that has been figuring in her conversation.

Another thing that she likes to do is demand songs from me.  Mostly songs about ducks, when it really comes down to it.  And she does it by title, though a certain degree of discernment is required to unpack which possible duck song, out of all the duck songs in the world, she is wanting me to sing.  In the following clip, she asks for the “geese and duck song,” which is a verse from “Surrey with a Fringe on Top” announcing that those fowl, along with some chicks, ought to scurry.

Other duck songs are “ducky song,” which is “Rubber Ducky,” and “duckling song,” which is the relevant verse from “Clementine” about driving ducklings to the water.  Sometimes she asks for “duckling and boot song,” which is two verses: the one about the ducks, and the one about Clementine’s enormous feet.***

Another favorite bird- and park-related activity was going to see the penguins.   We have many videos of penguins swimming, but this seems to be Margaret’s favorite.

*Also, Ellie** decided that she needed to eat A LOT last night, and that she was against being put down, so I have a really good excuse for slightly scatty prose.  I usually need an excuse, but right now I have one, so I’d like it to be noted.

**My mother has noted, apropos of the great nickname debates that raged with Margaret, that we now have kids that we can call El and M.  Apparently we need an N, and O, and a P.  I’m not, at this moment, seeing that in my future.

***I was singing her the whole song, since she liked it, but then I decided that it wasn’t a great idea to try to allay her fears about her baby sister by singing her songs in which younger sisters wait until one has drowned, and then swoop in and steal one’s boyfriend.  It didn’t seem to create the right sort of attitude towards little sisters.  And the more you read between the lines, the more the little sister looks like a poor prospect.  I mean, why doesn’t SHE take the ducklings to the water some of the time?  What’s she doing when not stealing men?