Friday, August 07, 2009 ~
After a rather commonplace day at work - Snoball getting attention from all the customers, throwing his toys and bowls around, opening every nut (or bag of nuts) in sight, and generally causing an endearing ruckus - I had to go handfeed the baby birds ... roughly 52 of them last I checked... Yes, 52 baby birds.
The whole process takes at least an hour, so I brought Snoball into the back with me. He played with (and broke) my hair tie on a towel-covered shelf while I sorted out all of the feeding equipment - syringes, measuring cups, etc. Then I brought him with me onto the counter where everything gets prepared. He sat and watched while I poured, weighed, measured, mixed - all of it. I think he was a little confused, actually. Snoball didn't understand why I was playing with such boring toys, or why I was moving water and formula back and forth from one container to another. Where's the fun in that?
The fun, Snoball discovered, comes when it's time to do the actual feeding. Snoball rode into the nursery on my shoulder for the first time. He was a little startled when a cacophony of crying babies started up. -lol- Snoball just watched for a while, trying to figure out why the babies were crying and what the heck I was doing. It wasn't long, however, before he realized that I was feeding them ... and was most definitely NOT feeding him.
Snoball then proceeded to stick his head into all of the baby buckets, one at a time, trying to steal formula from the syringes before the babies got it! -lol- Most of the babies don't finish all of their formula, so I gave Snoball the leftovers. I handed him a small syringe just to see what he would do with it. He picked it up and turned it over and around, trying to figure out how to get the food out. His first thought - which would have eventually been successful had I not intervened - was to chew the tip off and get the food that way. I didn't want him to break the syringe, so I took it back from him and started dripping it into his mouth. And believe it or not, Snoball actually licked it up, little by little.
When I was setting up the feeding instruments for Katie today, Snoball kept looking at me sideways as if to say, "Well? When does the food come out?" -lol- I guess he'll be my helper from now on when I handfeed the babies. :)
Image credit: http://hahli1994.deviantart.com/
