A month!?

Seriously, it's been a month since I've posted?

Where does the time go???

So much has been going on that the days just seem to fly by.

Memorial Day coming up this Monday, and I have had a cookout for the past few years. We live less than a block from the parade route, so everyone comes over to our house, we get to walk to the end of the road and enjoy the music and festivities. Then everyone comes back, we hang out on the porch and in the sun, the kids play in the sprinkler and everyone enjoys some tastey grilled food and red/white/blue treats. Hopefully I will have some great pictures to share with you all this year :) 

PLUS, since the school had scheduled 4 snow days and we only used one, my son will be off of school from this Friday until Tuesday, instead of just the Monday of Memorial Day. He's already got a sleep-over planned with Grandma and Grandpa at their new camp so they can have a "fishing weekend" and we may head to the "bounce place" (as he calls it) for some all day, indoor bounce house fun on Monday or Tuesday. Needless to say, he is looking forward to this weekend.

I hope all the moms out there had a WONDERFUL Mother's Day! And, speaking of Mother's Day....

I was the recipient of two of these lovely red, yellow and blue flower filled hanging baskets for Mother's Day. I got to pick them out myself and I just love the mix of colors and how nice and full they are.

We put them up on Mother's Day (Sunday). On Monday, we noticed that there were two cute little birds that seemed to be hanging around our porch, flying into one of the baskets and picking out flowers.

There are plenty of places to nest in the area that wouldn't involve killing our new flowers, bird poop on the porch that our 2 year old would get into, or (most importantly for the bird) the chance of us scaring them when we used the door and the adult flying away/knocking eggs or babies out of the nest.

So, for a day we would open the door and shoo them away when they would come on the porch, hoping that they would pick somewhere else to build their nest before they actually got to the building stage.

Then we tried tying ribbon to the baskets, thinking maybe the movement of the ribbon would keep them away?

Nope. Neither seemed to work.

They kept coming back and picking heads off of the flowers. So I called the expert (AKA, my mom).

Apparently, the type of bird we have (I have since found out is a House Finch) only makes a small nest, so there is no chance of them killing our flowers.

Also, something I never thought about, but makes complete sense - there shouldn't be any bird poo on our porch since they pick up any droppings when they leave the nest and drop them as they fly, to keep the nest clean.

DUH. I've never seen a bird nest full of droppings, so why would I think that our porch would be covered in it?

So, we let them build their nest.

 They built it right on the edge of the basket, instead of right in the middle like we thought they would.

Yesterday as we watered the flowers we noticed that there is an egg in the nest now, and as of today, there are TWO!

I registered our nest with NestWatch and have been keeping it updated with its current status (when the first egg was laid, etc). They also track Eastern Bluebirds, Swallows, Chickadees, Robins and many more - take a peek if you have any birds nesting in your area!

(Wish I had found this site last year when we had our Robins nesting next to the driveway!)

Anyway...the birds aren't "used to us" using the door, so she still flies away every time we go out the doo. We are hoping that the eggs/babies don't get harmed/knocked out of the nest. Otherwise, I have been trying to figure out a way to hook up my webcam outside so that we could watch them without disturbing them.

 I'd love to have a live feed of the nest, wouldn't you? For now, I'll be sure to keep everyone updated on the progress of our resident birdies :)