Introducing....

Squirrel and Little Bird!

I've struggled with the whole don't-put-your-kids-name-on-the-internet thing. I know that pretty much everyone who reads this is a personal friend or family member and already know my kids names, and so it has been tempting to just "out" them with their real names...but I do actually get a surprising number of foreign language and bizarre comments (hello, comment moderation), and when it comes to my children, I don't really feel like I can be too safe at maintaining their privacy.

In the beginning, I sort of just called each of them SOMEthing, because I didn't want to use their names, but never felt like I'd get as much pleasure from continuing to post as I do, so the time finally came to give them official "blog names". I hated the idea of calling them just another name here, because their names are so tied to my perception of them, so I've been thinking and scouring to come up with a name for each of them. I had a few parameters I wanted to meet--nature inspired, indicative of their personality, short, memorable, and something Thoreau would have liked. :)

So first, here's Squirrel:

Two and a half years old and full to the brim with crazy, she fits Thoreau's description here pretty much perfectly:

"All day long the red squirrels came and went and afforded me much entertainment by their maneuvers [...] for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl--wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance--I never saw one walk--and then suddenly, [...] he would be in the top of a young pitch pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time,--for no reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect." 

Every minute spent watching this child is filled with movement, and words, and dance, and chatter, and delight. So Squirrel she hath been dubbed.


Next up, is Little Bird:

He's about to turn one, and if I had to describe him in a word, it would be exuberant. Though Thoreau often wrote of the songs of the chickadees and sparrows that brought joy to him, I just couldn't find quite the right birdie/nickname for my little man. The inspiration didn't actually come from Thoreau's writing, but was created when a poem by one of his contemporaries came to my mind:

XXXII

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

                                           --Emily Dickinson

He is a Little Bird that perches in the soul. Endlessly happy and unfaze-able, he is the child that lights a room with his smile and laughter and only lives to be loved on. He is the Little Bird in my heart.

So there they are, my two little wild creatures in our own little Walden. Mesmerizing, joyful, light-giving.