Meet Gertie, the smallest of our three baby finches, and by far my favorite one. She has a special look of determination in her eye that strikes me. Maybe because she is the smallest and has to work extra hard to get to the front of the nest to be fed, fighting over her large, clumsy brothers and sisters. All the babies are out of the nest now, moving comfortably around the cage. Except for Gertie. In my human opinion, she is not ready to be out of the nest, but I think she feels pressure from her siblings who hop from branch to branch in the cage. I have put Gertie back into the nest so many times, that now she opens her mouth to be fed when my hand comes searching into the cage for her tiny frame. During our "photo shoot" this morning, she sat quietly in my hand and even closed her eyes and snoozed for a little while.
Emma named her. She was verballing scrolling through a list of names that rhymed with "birdy" and when she hit "Gertie", I jumped on it. In fact, I anticipated her eventually arriving at this name as she passed through the list: sertie, mertie, fertie, kertie….So when she arrived at Gertie, I jumped, "Gertie!! I love it! Emma, you did such a great job of coming up with a name for the baby bird!" She was quite proud of herself for coming up with the name. Oh, the manipulation a mother must stoop to at times.

In the meantime, Emma was outside jumping in the sprinkler while I watered the garden. At the point when I asked her to turn off the hose, she was only wet from the waist down. When she arrived inside, she was soaked head to toe, and mysteriously was carrying all of her shower paraphernalia with her, including powder and my hair brush. She proclaimed proudly that she had taken her shower outside. "How??" I asked…"I showered in the puddles." That would explain the bits of dead leaves , grass and mud caked to her scalp.