In the Business of Saving Ducklings

We wake up early every morning just to prepare and eat breakfast together as a family before Eric leaves for work. This morning is no exception. Eric is doing morning chores with the animals while I flip pancakes on the stove and receive tight leg hugs from the two girls.

Breakfast is ready. "Beth, look! I let the mamas take the ducklings out today!," Eric calls. I look out the window. The ducklings crowd together on the sidewalk in the backyard, mamas herding them on both sides. I run for my camera squealing something way too high pitched about them being so adorable I have to take pictures. No sooner had I snapped a few shots when it begins to rain. And not just your drizzly one drip here one drop there kind of rain. This is an all out downpour.

I run into the house. The ducks are racing with their ducklings back to the shelter of the coop. The four of us stand at the back door for a minute, watching the empty spaces between ground and sky fill with rain that falls hard and fast. "I'm going to make sure the ducklings made it back into the coop ok," Eric says. He runs outside.

A moment later I hear him call frantic. I tell the girls to stay inside and keep the screen door closed. Lexi is angry, but I rush out anyway. "Take care of your sister!" I call as I run into the rain, barefoot in my running clothes.

I am soaked to the skin in thirty seconds. Eric is at the back of the coop, behind the pile of scrap wood that is haphazardly stacked there between the coop and the back of the garage. "I need your help! Take these and get them into the coop, then come back for more!" He shoves two peeping, soaking wet ducklings into my hands. They weigh less than a slice of my whole wheat bread. They are wet and scared. I sprint with them to the door of the coop and set them down inside the entrance, where they run to their mamas and the rest of their brothers and sisters for warmth.

The rain continues to pour. Eric keeps handing me ducklings. In the commotion of the sudden rain and a mad dash of chickens to the coop, the babies were separated from their mom and lost their way. A duckling escapes Eric's grasp, running on it's webbed feet to the side of the coop that edges our neighbors yard. Eric chases it towards the front and we catch it, huddled under the edge of our overflowing rain barrel. Back at the scrap pile we hear distressed peeping. "There is one buried!" I yell. "We have to find it!" I am almost crying. We have to find it! We lift up the scraps of wood, trying our best not to let anything fall and potentially crush the duckling underneath. Layer after layer until finally, it hops free and runs, not into Eric's outstretched hands, but through the chain link fence and into our neighbor's yard!

I am frantic. It's barely 7 o'clock. It's storming like crazy, and this duckling is going to die if we can't save it within minutes. Eric runs around the front of the house into the neighbor's yard. The duckling runs into the hardest place imaginable to catch it - the space between the fence and the garage. I climb over the scrap wood barefoot, in the rain, and scale the fence, dropping into the mud below. I find the duckling under a hasta plant, but it runs away from me, heading towards the next neighbor's yard. Eric, at this point, has come back into our yard and now has to jump over the rain barrel (that is heavily overflowing and spilling water everywhere), hop the fence again and try to catch it before it is lost forever.

The duckling races along the side of the neighbor's house that is furthest from us, Eric is close on it's fuzzy little tail and fast little legs. He finally catches it cornered next to a flower pot and the front steps in the neighbor's front yard. He hands the rogue bird to me and I race it back to the coop, where the mamas promptly come at me angrily as I hand back their missing baby.  We set a heat lamp on them in the next few minutes and they all huddle beneath it for warmth. The rain is settling. All 24 are safe.

I remember my own babies waiting for me inside.
I run into the house, dripping cold rain everywhere, hoping that Lexi heeded my instructions.
My daughters are in the kitchen, happily munching on grapes that Lexi got from the fridge. "Mom, I got Lyla and me a snack!" she says proudly. And she is not the only one who is so proud.

We are finally dry and munching pancakes when I look at my happy three-year-old and say, "Thank you, Lexi, for doing such a good job of taking care of your sister while Daddy and I were outside saving ducklings!"
Eric laughs. "Who even says that?!"
Even so, this is our normal.
Saved more than ten ducklings from imminent death before 7 AM. Check.