Generosity

When Baby B and I emerged from the Swedish café this afternoon (where he'd eaten all the cardamom bun, bar a small piece he'd sweetly offered to R - see the extra - and a sub-atomic morsel he'd presented to me, stuck on the end of one finger), the first thing we saw was a squirrel, sitting at the base of a large beech tree, eating nuts.

I explained what was happening, and when, shortly afterwards, the squirrel went off to look for food elsewhere, B walked over to the tree and searched around among the carpet of husks on the ground until he found a couple of nuts. I can only think that someone else in the family must have explained the difference to him, because I certainly didn't - although we did talk about conkers and their husks last week, and he is a genius, so it's possible that he was applying that knowledge to this new situation.

Whatever, once he'd found the nuts he set off up the hill after the squirrel, and proceeded to follow it around for the next twenty minutes, holding out the nuts, while making a noise that was half way between an air kiss and the kind of mouth popping sound he uses to represent a fish. I have no idea why he thought that you might need to use a noise of some kind to attract a squirrel, or why he chose this one, but the performance was repeated so often that there's no doubt at all that this was what he was doing.

R and I - caught between finding the whole thing funny and charming on the one hand, and heart-breaking on the other - explained to him (numerous times) that squirrels are scared of people, and there was no way therefore that this one was going to come and take the nuts from him, but we might as well have saved our breath. Every now and then the squirrel would go up a tree, and I would manage to persuade B that the best thing to do was to find a nice obvious place, such as this stone, and leave the nuts so that the squirrel could find them later, but then it would reappear at ground level, and B would pick up the nuts ("Two!") and begin his air-kissing, nut proffering pursuit again.

And then suddenly, after twenty racking minutes, it was over. He was searching for the nuts at the time after accidentally dropping them in the grass, but was distracted by the arrival of a large ride-on mower. Dilemma: keep looking for the nuts, or go to see the mower? R and I tipped the balance by explaining that the squirrel would be able to find the nuts quite easily in the grass, and at this point the mower won out. Better yet, as we approached it the mower hared off out of the park to go and do mowing somewhere else, and at this point B graciously consented to being taken home.

As I said to R later, the only thing more stressful that seeing our Best Beloved being rejected by the squirrel he was trying to befriend would have been needing to intervene if it had approached him. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the squirrel for not confounding our expectations about its behaviour, despite the fact that it lives in a city park where it sees humans every day, and presumably sees them as a potential source of free food.

And now to this week's Tiny Tuesday results. Many thanks to everyone who played - I had great fun looking through all the entries, and I didn't find it easy to choose my favourites. But this week my hearts go (in no particular order) to:

Ingeborg
Trisharooni
V1k1
Nicoiseannie
Incredibish

And my Honourable Mentions - again, in no particular order - go to:

heanku
Sheol
GEO2B
isbi
Teba
chrisf

I hope that you'll all play again next week, when the tag will be TT385.