Sometimes I would take the kids on a walk to a nearby park.  There were lovely bike paths down tree lined avenues.  I was pushing two in a stroller, and the other two ran ahead of me.  The older kids found a nestling robin.  It had baby feathers on it, but could not fly.  I scooped it into my hand and we turned around to go home.  I had raised just such a juvenile bird when I was in my teens. It was a born free experience for another story.

We put the robin into a softly lined shoe box.  I used a little water in a straw to hydrate it.  I had made a spaghetti dinner for the kids, a messy affair.  I examined the nestling all over.  I saw what looked like a bone sticking out from under it’s tiny wing.  “Oh, no.”  I thought.

The kids had spaghetti sauce around their mouths and down the front of their tee shirts.  I called the vet, on a Friday afternoon.  The sun was starting to go down.  With great luck, he answered the phone.  He was still there!  I hustled the kids and the baby bird into my family boat of a car.

The vet and I were friends due to the multiple pets we had.  He looked at the baby robin and at me and the kids.  “I think it has a broken wing.” I said.  He lifted the tiny wings and to my surprise he said, “Do you mean this?”  It was a fragment of what looked like a wing bone to me.  “Yes!”  I said, sadly.

He looked at me and the four kids.  “Did you, by any chance, have spaghetti for dinner?”  I said, “Yes, we did.”  This “bone” is a piece of spaghetti.  I blushed from head to toe.  He smiled.

“My wife happens to be out of town this week.”  he said.  “I will take this nestling home with me to keep me from drinking too much at the bars in town.  You look like you have your hands kind of full.”

“Yes, it is a bit wild with the four so young.  My husband works long hours.”  Then I hugged him so hard I left a spaghetti sauce smear on his lab coat.  “Thank you, thank you!”  I cried.

The kids cried all the way home, of course, because we no longer had the baby bird.