Another one?

No, mom, I have a ten year IUD for which choice (which I made at the age of 37) I was the butt of much teasing amoung my friends, remember? It was an easy choice, actually. Considering both my mother and my grandmother had more than 2 decade age spreads between their oldest and youngest children; and that neither started having children especially early; and that neither had the benefit of fertility drugs, well. I can do simple math. So, no, not another child.

Would you believe another bird?

You know, my spouse does not even look like St. Francis af Assisi and probably could not tell a statue of St. Francis from a Bologna sandwich. Though he can almost certainly find either Assisi or Bologna on a map as he is very good at geography He is also apparently very good at finding lost little birds.

It isn't fair; he wasn't the little boy who brought home various waifs and strays and nursed them back to health. That was Ernest. Dearly Beloved was the little boy with the dead lizard in his pocket because he stuck it in there and forgot all about it until washday. So what's up with the birds?

The latest addition to our little pensione is a very young jackdaw which is, for those of you in the South, very much like a crow or a magpie. It is in short the anti Noah (Noah being the dove he nursed back to health and released last year). A jackdaw is black with a grey head. They eat, it turns out, primarily meat. It certainly has a beak for eating meat -- one of the websites I was looking at warns that they like shiny things and that you should be careful about your eyes for this reason, woo hoo.

The children have named it Grijsje, which means little grey in Dutch. Well, it's the grey equivalent of naming it Blackie -- Grey-ey doesn't flow right off the fingers or the tongue, does it? Paul wants to call it Loki for the Norse god of chaos. He is aware, as it is sort of a hobby of his, that it was actually Odin who had the two ravens. But he points out that they had really impronounceable names, even for a Dutch person. Apparently Mozart had a pet jackdaw and Paul will settle for naming his bird whatever Mozart named his, if I can find out what it was.

The bird has expressed no opinion.

Did I mention upon whom it has devolved to find out what this thing is supposed to eat and feed it and clean its cage and make sure it is regularly handled and cared for and so on?

Grumble, grumble. I after all have nothing else I need to do.