Summer Memories 2018

This year we had a house guest! It was a little baby hummingbird. We found this hummingbird sitting behind the tire of a truck and we were worried it was going to be run over. Also, it was cheeping constantly, and not making any move to fly away. We looked around to try and find its nest, but couldn't find it, and there wasn't really a tree we could put it in either. 

 We put the poor little thing in a flowering plant in hopes it would drink: it seemed so dehydrated! But it didn't move. Come to find out, hummingbirds like red, orange and pink flowers the best, so maybe that was the problem. But as it sat there peeping its distress cry, I got really worried that a cat would come find it, so I took it home. We made it a little nest in a cardboard box and prepared it sugar water. It almost dove into the sugar water! We knew we could only feed it like that for a day, though, so we prayed that the poor little things would mature enough over night to fly away the next day.

 Evelyn loved her new "pet", and we decided to name it "Cricket" because of the constant tiny peeps it emitted. They were about as loud as a little cricket's. We fed it regularly, (its little tongue would flick in and out of its hollow beak so quickly to lick our fingers!) and the next day released it back onto the tree outside our condo. We checked on it regularly and were a bit alarmed when it still didn't fly away or make any attempt to move, but later in the day, an adult hummingbird started feeding it: I guess it heard the little peeps too. I wonder if it was the mother, or just a kindly hummingbird as we were a few blocks away from where we originally found it.

 Eventually, Cricket did fly off: we watched as he flew across the street and directly into the red tail-light of a parked car. I wonder if that's why it was under the car the first time we found it?! That is not a red flower, little one! We picked up and put it back in the tree. The next day it had flown. We spent the next few days checking behind taillights of parked cars to make sure it didn't make that mistake again, but we never found him again.

 During our ward camp out, we had bb gun and archery training. Evelyn loved it! She and Michael shot for over an hour, until she could no longer lift her bow with her shaky tired muscles. She was really good at it too. By the end of the practice, she got three bullseyes right in a row!