BOOOO!
The Easter Heron is coming to get you!!!
No, no, never fear, the Easter Heron is just a dream. You're fine. Easter is over. We celebrated that to the chocolatey end! It was all cuddly bunnies and chocolate eggs. No dinosaurs in sight. Well... No.
At least at our shindig, there was plenty of birdiness....
Eggs of course. Hardboiled as Easter tradition requires.
I would say it went well. Also, I boiled them for a shorter time, so the yolk is much less chalky than the usual and I love them forked up and spread on cracker.
As for Easter itself, well...
Easter is probably as big of a deal as Christmas here (since the Easter Bunny has been Allan's favorite holiday symbol since birth more or less). In some ways. It's also way chiller. The big difference being that it's mostly just from me and to Allan instead of managing tons of different relationships and packages that need various forms of wrapping and management. Andrew did get a basket (see the littler one with the fancy darker chocolates), but largely of course it's about Allan.
I've come to find that if we observe Christmas, Easter and Birthday it's just about often enough to restock her book, art supplies, dessert, and general clothing/hair ties needs. I admit to saving things I ordinarily would just give her throughout the year for these particular gift-days, because... well... dopamine!
Oh yea, the See's Candy stuff was stuff Allan picked out to share with Andrew. The rest will be dessert over the next several weeks to months.
Of course the egg hunt is the most important part. And the source of most of our dessert offerings for the next several months!
Allan's gotten damned good at THE HUNT. Her inner forager is strong. We can whirlwind through the entire three floors in about a half hour (with the occasional egg straggler that none of us find for days to weeks) Though, I will say it took her a little while to notice the new poster.
We love Sibley here. His little laminated fold out field guides have been a source for hours of drawing practice for Allan, and bird reference for all of us. The Easter Crow left us a poster in addition to several more Sibley guides. I'm kind of thrilled. That wall was really boring for a long time.
The hours after egg hunt and basket (Andrew ate breakfast - Allan ignored it to read), Allan read two and a half of her books and chanted out the text of every single field guide couple of times. She carried around the See's candy with her to various sitting locations, never cracking it open. I don't think she had a single sweet or chocolate for the entire morning.
Bit before lunch time, Andrew was summoned for the communal eating of the chocolate bunnies
And over the next several days, she decided that Andrew had had enough and ate the See's candies on her own schedule.
Easter brought with it a spell of truly "beautiful" (aka sneezy itchy) days. All the flowers were briefly in bloom and spring really was pulling out the stops
I'm happy to say that this has briefly passed. This morning I went to feed the birds and was greeted by a delightful light rain. It won't last, but I have a little while to breath easier and we have another week where nature will happily water our new plants.
We have a few avian harbingers of spring as well. Seems most of the birds in our neighborhood know a good thing when they see it and stick around. While there are influxes of robins and bushtits through the year, it doesn't seem strictly seasonal. Our first robin invasion was late summer, for instance, and they've been back in force since then. We might be seeing a few more yellow rumped warblers (cuties!!) but I'm assured they never left the area as much as maybe our street.
Technically, red winged black birds are common here year round (apparently), but we'd not seen them until this last week. During winter they flock together, but in breeding periods, a male takes over a territory and consorts with several females on that territory. The females raise all the babies and the male aggressively guards the territory by screaming something akin to KONKLAREEEEEEEEEE with a real twilling buzz at the end and occasionally swoop attacking things much larger than him like horses and herons. So far we've been spared, but every day is a new adventure!
The tree swallows are truly spectacular. I cannot for the life of me grab a pic of them because they are tiny and super duper fast. They swoop over the pond, skimming up tiny insects and then vanish just as quickly. They are beautiful though. Little roundish bodies with a slightly forked tail and a gorgeous green iridescence that reminds me of a mermaid costume I had as a child.
Somebody else's photo for illustration:
They look like they're performing in the circus with that mask!
The crows remain, but they are acting different at the moment. Mostly tearing branches off of trees and flying around with sticks!
They also will vanish for a few days and then reappear en masse to grab peanuts. Definitely a nesting vibe!
Everyone else is just singing really really loudly! It's a roar of birdsong out there right now, particularly the house finches, but also the towhees and juncos and song sparrows.
It's nice.
As promised, I had a follow up with my doctor the other day. Not particularly reassuring. Mostly because she literally just kind of read out loud some kind of Doctor AI summary about my question, then furrowed her brow and asked me if I could be pregnant, had had any infections, traumas, or cancer...to which I guess I kind of wanted to say, I dunno, you tell me, since that's your fucking job (I think I did say "Not that I know of, which is why I'm here...")
I realize this is a problem with the US medical model and insurance, but I don't think it's a good system if it's become unreasonable to expect my primary doctor (coming into the appointment 15 minutes after it was scheduled) to have actually looked at my file before coming into a meeting.
We did have the "sensitive but not specific" or however that goes, and I would be willing to accept an astronomically high test result is just a quirky MCAS thing if confidently explained. But, I don't know, there was just a lot more shrug than anything else.
She subsequently concluded that if anything is up, symptoms will come out to make it clearer. To which I wanted to reply "Oh like once the cancer has metastasized you mean?" Not saying I think I have cancer, but I think if that's something to rule out "we can wait until it's gotten bad enough the symptoms are no longer non-specific" when every cancer is like "easy to treat if caught early but never caught early because the symptoms are so non-specific!" is not really exciting!
Anyways, I fully get that people get weird test results all the time and tons of times they just kind of resolve on their own. I even support the decrease in Pap smear test frequency as a level of harm reduction from unnecessary testing etc. But bluff a little better anyways.
On the bright side, I actually have an appointment to get my xolair. Finally! Only took four months or so! I'm pleased that my new doctor's office not only files paperwork appropriately, but regularly answers their phones! Novel!
At any rate, life is going on as it relentlessly does. But that means plenty of new birdies and some crows with cute blue eyes and red mouths! I'm open to it!
Happy April y'all!
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