Care

Because he's a huge 21-month old boy now, B doesn't want to feed the ducks by having R tear up slices of bread and hand small pieces to him one at a time: he wants to do it all himself. But after he'd hurled one complete slice into the Avon (which was promptly ripped apart by competing waterfowl, to be fair), I explained to him very seriously that this was a bad idea, because birds only have very little mouths, and if they try to swallow big lumps of bread it might harm them. At which point he did this - carefully tearing the bread into smaller and smaller pieces, before collecting them up a few at a time and taking them to the water's edge to throw them in.

There are several things about this that make me a bit misty-eyed. Firstly, it only seems about ten minutes since he was a helpless baby, and now look at him! Secondly, he's a natural scamp - a child who adores playing, and making up jokes and tricks - and also, if I'm completely honest, a little bit of a thug on occasion; but he's also kind, and doesn't like hurting anyone, and therefore he took my warning very seriously, and acted on it. And thirdly, he can probably only articulate around thirty intelligible words or syllables right now - but his comprehension is so far ahead of that, as to be genuinely amazing.

Today was the first day of what I think will be B's last solo visit for a while. I'm not going to lie - it has been tiring; but it's also been rewarding and fun. We'd felt pretty lucky even before this in getting to spend a few hours a week with him, but these visits have taken our relationship with him to another level, and that's made us very happy.

I should just say, by the way, in light of the controversy over the feeding of bread to waterfowl, that I once had a conversation about this with Stratford's swan warden, and he told me that he doesn't have a problem with it - especially in the colder months, when the birds need the calories - provided the bread is thrown on the water so that they take in fluid at the same time. Personally I prefer to give waterfowl nuggets, but those aren't as easy for tiny hands to throw as pieces of bread.