Michael never knows what I’ll bring home when I go grocery shopping at Aldi. My favorite store often has “special purchases” that include all sorts of electronic things, clothing, bedding, furniture, kitchen wares, or outdoor things for the yard and garden. Some of my “finds” include Veggie Tales DVDs, a down comforter, pillows, flower bulbs, a flat-edged shovel, a yard broom, a cool hose-wand attachment, and a box of suet cakes that included a “free” holder to hang up.

As Michael helps carry in the groceries, he just shakes his head and smiles. I think maybe the bird suet puzzled him the most so far. When I finally put the thing together and hung the feeder up on the porch, I think he was just glad that I was happy. The lonesome cake of suet hung there for quite a while when finally we noticed that some birds had actually found it! More and more they’ve been making their appearance, most notably a certain woodpecker who is a little shy about coming so close to our porch to have a snack. Little by little he has been willing to come a little closer, and we have been delighted by his antics. He’ll fly to a nearby tree, examine all of us, then fly to a different tree and check us out. Finally when he has worked up his courage he’ll actually land on the feeder but then look all around making sure we aren’t about to have him for lunch. Then, once he starts to eat, he’ll keep checking up on us, making sure we haven’t come any closer to him.

All of us have learned to hold very still when the woodpecker comes for a visit. One of the kids said that he is smaller than what they thought woodpeckers would be. And Miguel and I had a discussion about whether or not the little fella’ was “our” woodpecker. I teased Miguel that he wasn’t our pet but that we were his pet. Miguel pondered that for a moment and then asked me how we would fly. I guess he thought the woodpecker might need to take us somewhere and we would need to fly. I assured him that wasn’t necessary and that the woodpecker would come visit us when he wanted to see us.

On Monday of this week, when we were at my parents’ house, we noticed a nice large trash pile at the neighbor’s house, so we took a look. Among other things, I found two beautiful bird feeders, so I grabbed them and brought them home. I put up hangers, Laura cleaned out the feeders, and Michael bought some fancy bird seed for us at Walmart. Now we are eager to see if we can attract even more birds to our front porch.

Meanwhile, we keep an extra sharp eye out for our woodpecker.