Bird's Egg Picnic

I wandered out to the play structure where my children and their cousins frolicked, and sat on the swing.

"Hi guys, what are you doing?"

"We're having a picnic. Want to see?" my son, Bigs, answered.

"Sure."

Inside the playhouse I saw the pits and stems from a pile of cherries they'd eaten. On the windowsill sat several leaves and some Fritos.

Bigs started to hand me a chip, then put it back on the leaf. "It's not done yet, it needs to cook more," he informed me.

"Oh, that looks like a good picnic," I smiled, enjoying his creativity and imagination.

"Yeah, and we had an egg. It was so yummy!"

"An egg? Where did you get an egg?"

"From the bird's nest."

With a sinking feeling I recalled the nest we'd admired earlier, with the innocent bird sitting contentedly therein.
My good sense told me he was just pretending, but I had to make sure.

"Oh, really? Where's the shell?"

"Littles smashed it."

It would be very much in character for my middle child to destroy something. And the more details he added, the more I was inclined to believe this was not product of imagination. Bigs isn't a very good liar.

Still, though, he couldn't be serious.

"And you ate the egg?"

"Yep. We cooked it in the sun and ate it. It was so yummy!"

"Are you telling the truth? Did you really eat it or are you just pretending?"

I looked into my son's eyes, knowing that he was incapable of not letting me know the truth. About that time, he began to realize that maybe what he'd done wasn't a good thing.

He dropped his eyes and tears filled his voice. "I'm not pretending. We cooked it in the sun and ate it."

Now, had we been at home in Phoenix where it's 105 degrees and the sidewalk really does get hot enough to fry an egg, it might not have been so bad. But we were in Portland, where the sky was overcast and the thermometer wavered somewhere in the low 70's.

My mind still hoped that he wasn't serious about taking the egg, or at the very least, that he hadn't really eaten it.

"Show me."

He led me to the windowsill on the shady side of the playhouse and showed me the spot where the wood was still wet from egg soaking into it. The egg itself was nowhere to be seen.

Choking back the desire to vomit, I pondered my options. Bigs is a very literal child. Had someone informed him it was not okay to steal birds' eggs and eat them raw, he never would have done it. But he also, apparently, has no common sense. He eats an egg for breakfast most mornings, and the sun is hot so it must be capable of cooking things. Clearly, the thought of salmonella or other risks never occurred to him.

That being the case, I didn't want to punish him. He didn't know he'd done anything wrong, and I knew him well enough to know that my disappointment would be punishment enough that he'd never do that again.

So I very calmly explained to him that he just killed the poor bird's baby, at which point his cousin piped in with "And ate it!"

Bigs' face fell, and I knew I could be assured of his repentance. That would be enough to ensure that this particular sin would not again be committed. Still, I thought I should make the expectations perfectly clear.

"No more eating birds' eggs. Don't climb up in that tree anymore, and leave the nest alone."

One more crisis averted, and without any lasting side effects that I know of. But he's only 5, and Littles is only 3. I have many more years of boyhood to contend with, and I have no doubts that my blog will have fodder to last several lifetimes.