Baby Birds

So, yesterday Colin & Ansley came running in the house super excited yelling "Mommy! Mommy! We found a baby bird!"  So I went to look for a basket to put it in.  By the time I got back they had found a second baby bird and were just about beside themselves.  So they filled the basket with pinestraw and started the hunt for bugs. 

 
Fortunately, Silas was sleeping, otherwise our story would end here with two dead birds.  Well, I was not exactly sure what to do with these guys.  They reminded me a little of Graham and Bennett, all chirpy crying with their mouths open,

 so I felt like I had to help look for bugs because the search wasn't going so well.  After looking forever it seems, we found one cricket that we cut in half and they had to share.  This was not going to be easy.  Plus, we couldn't bring them in the house and if we left them outside a cat would have got them.  So they spent the night in the laundry room, and then this morning I sat down with the kids to pitch my idea of trying to get them back in the nest.  I had to ask some more specific questions about the location where they found them, did they see a nest, etc.  and this interrogation led to a surprise ending:  Evidently "found" in my five year old's vocabulary is equivalent to "knocked out of the bush because I want a pet bird."  So upon this discovery we had a lecture on how God gave Adam the animals to take care of, not to steal them away from their mommies.  At any rate, the birds now have the ritz-carlton of bird's nests,

we can see them from the kid's bathroom window, and the mommy bird is still feeding them, thank goodness.

As R. pointed out last night, I think I have enough mouths to feed.