Today my wife and I took our son to see some ducks. We didn’t go to the normal park I’ve been writing about recently. While they certainly have ducks there it would have been very busy being Saturday evening on a holiday weekend. Instead we went to a public park with no playground. Our aim was to get our son in front of what appears to be his favorite animal. We wanted him to be able to get up close to a real live duck and feed it something to eat. We specifically went out and got something to feed the ducks and headed to the park.
It was a little later in the afternoon. On the way our son was trying to sleep and we tried to keep him awake. We were almost there, after all, and the ducks probably wouldn’t be as interested in a sleeping little boy as they would be with an awake little human tossing them something to eat. We made it there just as his eyelids were closing. The opening of the door and un-buckling of his seat signaled that something was happening and he quickly awoke at the sound of “Quack” coming from outside.
We headed for the water. This area, we noticed, was much less eroded than the water near our normal park. Without the distractions of other children, swings, and slides, he quickly made his way toward the water. There were many ducks on the other side of the shore. This didn’t deter us at all. Three ducks were seemingly very close. We the arm and aim of adults my wife and I tossed some food into the water to get the ducks’ attention. Soon they were heading our way. Our son wasted no time tossing food to the ducks. He quickly acclimated to their presence and was literally jumping up and down with excitement to have some new duck friends. His excitement, of course, scared the ducks. Since it was cold (oddly) we tossed some parting food to the ducks before saying goodbye. Our son, I think, dreamt of ducks from his car seat on the way home.