Yesterday, Mark and I threw a family birthday party for stepkid #4, which involved a bunch of cleaning, followed by the arrival of 4 kids, two significant others and my mom. We drove to a local Mexican restaurant for lunch, had some birthday cake and opened a few lame presents. By the time our highly sugared guests were shooed from the house, I had just enough time to walk around the lake with my 13-year-old female dog, Little Dipper. The lake is only a wee bit frozen and looks like this.
Nearby, I saw a muskrat had come out for the last bit of sun and, well, I’m not sure what all a muskrat does on ice. He or she did not care for my company for some reason and quickly plopped back into the water.
- Muskrat chilling on ice.
Then I saw were these guys. They didn’t seem to like my company, either, and kept flying right on by.
- Canada geese unwilling to stop in to say hi.
Nearby was the real surprise. I had seen three swans on the lake from my distant bay window for several days and had assumed they were all mute swans. We had a pair of mute swans nest on our lake this year and we very seldom see any native swans. Yet there, hanging out with two mute swans yesterday was a trumpeter swan.
Like most people who go visiting waterfowl, I took some whole, shelled corn with me, and soon the swans came over to sample some. Clearly, the trumpeter swan had already been eating, so the corn was for dessert.
- Trumpeter swan forgot to wipe its mouth after its first meal.
The trumpeter stuck its mouth in the water, blew a few bubbles . . .
. . . and cleaned its beak off. Then it ate a little corn.
It didn’t eat for long, perhaps because corn is rather bland and my company equally so, and soon the trumpeter turned and floated away.
It’s a good thing I stopped by to say hi to the swans, because today, on my way home, all three of the swans were gone.
And as a result, there is one less distraction from the ongoing task of marketing my book, From Zero to Four Kids in Thirty Seconds, about becoming a stepmom to those four kids I mentioned.