Catching birds, scaring children

Often when we’re on the way somewhere, I’ll send the girls out to the car ahead of me.  Sim knows the routine well enough that when I say, “Okay, girls, jackets –”  he’ll interrupt and say, “and boots!”  They go into the mud room and I open the van’s sliding doors and finish getting ready, then go out and join them. 

This works really well for a number of reasons.  First of all, I can see the van from the house, so I can watch and make sure all is well.  Second, I can do the last couple of things while they get buckled in, which makes things a lot faster for us.  Third, they get antsy if they have to wait around, so once they get their outside stuff on, they can just go.

On Sunday a couple of weeks ago, we did this routine as we were on the way out the door to Mass.  As Michael and Sim and I were in the mud room putting on shoes, we heard Naomi start crying.  This is one drawback of this system:  sometimes the girls get on each other’s nerves as they’re getting in the car, and then a fight ensues.

I was annoyed – what was going on?  They were both in a pretty good mood on their way out, what had they figured out to do to upset each other?  The crying began to be interspersed with screams as  Michael hurried out to investigate. 

When I got out there a minute or two later, the crying was still going on, and Michael was opening car doors and doing other things that seemed inexplicable given the situation.  However, then I realized that Hannah was saying that there was a bird in the car. 

There was a bird on the dashboard.  Naomi’s hysteria stemmed from that.  The bird was more scared, though – it had pooped on the dash.  Hannah unfortunately mentioned this to Naomi, whose screams redoubled.  Michael and I got enough doors open that the bird finally flew out.  Phew!

We got Naomi calmed down (throughout the escapade, Hannah sat calmly reading her book – when she wasn’t giving Naomi the blow-by-blow description of what the bird was doing).  Naomi shared with us that she didn’t like the bird in the car (um, yes, we’d gathered that), that she didn’t ever want another bird in the car, that she had screamed and cried about the bird, etc.  Naomi talked about it all the way to Mass. 

Hannah, on the other hand, described the bird to us (we mostly saw it flying out in a frenzy of relief – I don’t think that bird will ever fly into another minivan, no matter how many crumbs might be there!) so that we could figure out what kind it was.  We determined that it was probably a sparrow.

The funniest part of this was what Naomi told us she was afraid of:  that the bird would make a nest in her hair.  When I earlier mentioned that I don’t always like the books that come from the library,  I didn’t realize that this one would be a problem, but that’s the only place she’s ever heard that a bird might nest on someone’s head.  You just never know.