For our anniversary, I got Sara a bird feeder. Exciting, right?

Well, as I had hoped, it was exciting for at least one person. At first, Evie wasn’t too excited about it. But once we got home and started explaining about how we would hang it on the porch and watch out the window, she started to get very excited. In fact, she was concerned that we get it up as soon as possible, since the birdies “didn’t get any breakfast so they’re probably hungry!” As if birds hadn’t been able to find any food to feed themselves before our bird feeder was created.

Sometimes, however, she would get a little confused on the difference between a bird house and a bird feeder. She kept asking where we were going to put the beds. So I explained that what we had was a bird feeder, which was more like a bird restaurant than a bird house.

Evie was concerned that the birds that ate at our restaurant wouldn’t have a place to stay. She wanted the birds to come live inside our house. Obviously we said no, but she tried to guilt us into it: “Some kids have the birds come into their house and then the mom opens the door for the birds to go outside and eat.”

So I hung it up outside Evie and I took a trip to the hardware store to get some seeds. Evie wanted to sit outside and wait for the birds to start coming, but we tried to tell her that we didn’t know how soon the birds would come. We were worried it would take a couple of days before any birds located our bird feeder, and we didn’t want her to be disappointed.

I happened to mention to Evie that maybe we should make a sign, so that the birds would know our restaurant was here and open for business. She really got behind that idea and immediately began working on a sign. The sign included many things, such as “a bird with two wings”, “a man with two very long arms putting bird seed in”, “seed on the ground”, and finally, signed “love (heart) birds”.

No joke, about 2 minutes after she put the sign in the window, we had our first customer!

Since then, we’ve had lots of birds (in fact, the seed is going down at a sort of alarming rate). Evie set a stool by the window permanently, so she can check several times a day to see if there are any birds.

Even when she was at the park, she was chasing the birds around shouting “We have a bird feeder at our house! We have a bird feeder at our house!” She’s a good promoter. She even has a name for our bird restaurant: “It’s the Bird Cheetah”, named after her very favorite restaurant name ever, the Electric Cheetah.

All in all, I have to say, the bird feeder was certainly money well spent!