"Feed The Birds"

Once upon a time, not so long ago (a couple months, really), I made bread.

It was my great idea to include some dried cherries from my cupboard. Ordinarily, this would have been a very yummy idea. As is turned out, the fruit was probably older than Joseph. The unfortunate result was 5 loaves of mostly delicious bread with a somewhat rancid taste.

It tasted best fresh (a term I can only use loosely when some of the ingredients were about 2 years past their prime). It was palatable toasted, if you told yourself not to think about it. And if you drank lots of milk.

But after the first loaf, I knew I would not be eating any more.

My husband was very kind. He used it for lunch sandwiches. When I remarked that it was nasty, he replied, "It's not bad." Eventually, the 2nd loaf was gone.

A couple of weeks ago, he pulled a 3rd loaf from the freezer. OK. Enough is enough. That bread is NOT good! Stop eating it! He said it was good. At that moment, he lost all the credit he's earned over the last 11 years of eating my failed cooking. I thought he suffered through those meals, but it turns out he really doesn't have any taste buds.

I got out a loaf of GOOD bread (don't mind tooting my own horn here) and forbade him (I'll pretend it this way...makes me look powerful) to eat the yucky one. A couple of days later, I took the kids to feed the birds...with an entire loaf of bread.


We took advantage of sunny spring day and headed for the Greenbelt in IF. This was the week Rebekah had been sick and I was tired of being stuck at home. We didn't stay too long and Rebekah was feeling pretty yucky by the time we left.

Yep...mid-April and we still have brown grass and leafless trees. But at least we can get by with only jackets and the snow has melted.

The girls were very good about sharing their chunks of bread. We thought we were going to feed the ducks, but we had more seagulls than anything. Luckily, homemade wheat bread is very filling (even for birds) and we had plenty to go around.
Joseph was more than willing to throw out the bread. I nearly lost baseball-sized chunks of bread at his doing, but grabbed his arm quickly enough...several times.

Sarah sat behind us at a safer distance from the water. She doesn't know she missed out on throwing bread. She'll get it next year.

There is a little war memorial in the park that the kids had to check out. Heavy weaponry...the perfect backdrop for a snap shot of children!

I hope no other little kids stopped by to feed the ducks this day. We filled them up so much that they had started swimming away!