For the Birds

This spring, our toddler decorated a bird house and we set it up on a shepherd's hook outside our picture window. To our surprise and delight, a mama bird took up residence pretty quickly. We saw her flying back and forth with twigs and things and built herself a nest. And then, abruptly, she was gone.

We thought that maybe there was too much foot traffic in the front yard. Otherwise we're not sure why she abandoned her home after about a week. The house was vacant the rest of the season (not surprising).

Then this fall with the new room slowly becoming our favorite place to hang out, we decided to take advantage of the good view of the backyard out the french doors and we hung up a bird feeder (same shepherd's hook, since we removed the house in the front).

Originally this post was going to be a call for help - after several days, we had no visitors. But suddenly yesterday:

The birds seem to have gotten the memo. We've seen blue jays and robins and whatever these little fellows are. We have a bird book by the door now to help identify them and we've put a little bowl of water out as well. The best part is we can enjoy these guys from inside our new room from the comfort of our sofa. Time to buy a better telephoto camera lens I guess.

Speaking of sofa and new room, we finally unfurled our new rug and LOVE IT. This is the ombre teal rug by CB2. We went with the smaller size (5'x8') after realizing the larger one (8'x10') would cover up almost all our new wood floor. And it fits beautifully. I love the way the shading follows the south-facing window, so it's like the sunlight on the floor (we tried it the other way but this direction was the clear winner). It perfectly matches one of our living room throw pillows, so it's more in line with the blues in the other room than I thought it would be.

Love love love.