An Extraordinary Day

Today, I venture in search of nests in the yard for my daughters and me to start monitoring. Instead, I see a lone sparrow egg where no sparrow egg should be. We all gather in the yard, leaving our ordinary Saturday chores aside.

We search high and low (even borrowing a huge ladder from our neighbor to inspect the gutters for nests), and we find no nest from where it might have fallen.

Where did it come from? What should we do with it?

We examine the fragility and beauty of it. We keep searching to solve the mystery of its origins. We debunk through research the myth that a mother sparrow won't accept the egg if we happened to replace it back into the nest. But we simply cannot find the nest.

The children cannot stop touching it, this thing that shouldn't be in their hands. Nothing is more important than this moment right here.

We observe and wonder. We also theorize that a greedy squirrel stole this and brought it here to eat but was promptly scared away by our fearsome kitten. We also learn about the difficulty of trying to hatch this egg on our own. We decide to leave it in the yard.

It's an otherwise ordinary day here, but in the midst of laundry and baking (like all days at Live with Flair) we pause for wonder and mystery. From a child's perspective, this is an extraordinary day. I like that perspective best of all.