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Yesterday a baby was born...

and so now we have our first whooper chick, and today I took my first turn as mother crane. This means wearing a sack with one sleeve made of white jersey and one sleeve edged with black (my wing) and elastic at the bottom, which hits below my knees, and a white hood over my head with a camo screen in front of my face (it's like wearing blinders on the sides and the top, or so I imagine, since I don't usually wear blinders). It means kneeling in sand below a heat lamp that heats the run to approximate ly 95 degrees, Fahrenheit, while wearing the aforementioned sack. It means doing all this in silence with a puppet on one hand that picks up tiny pellets of food and offers them, repeatedly, to a small bird.

What echoes through my head during this whole process is that I don't want to mess this up. This is the first chick of the year (currently nameless--the name theme this year is cheese, and a list of possibilities is being compiled, and then there will be voting, and THEN there will be a name), and it has been entrusted to us, and somehow by wearing these ridiculous sacks and not talking to it and getting it to drink water from a long-handled red spoon we might teach this tiny bird to be a crane (if no one steps on it--which has happened). What? I still don't believe this actually works. I'm learning how to be a crane at the same time the chick is, though hopefully at a faster rate. Will either of us turn into functioning adults? I'll keep you posted.