Bird Eggs

Those finches that were added to our pet collection are currently sitting on ten eggs. I'm not sure if I should be hoping they all do hatch, or that only the four most recent ones hatch, or that none of them hatch, LOL! The birds are very faithfully tending the nest, and I'm having the hardest time getting them to keep the paper on the bottom of the cage. They keep tearing it into little strips and putting it into the nest, despite the fact that I've given them little strips of cloth/thread to nest in, and they've been plucking their feathers non-stop. Ah well, I suppose in about a week we shall see how many babies we are dealing with (YIKES!). Imagine... I'll be 38 weeks pregnant, and we'll have baby birds having just shown up out of their eggs. This could be a noisy end of pregnancy!! At least the female (a.k.a. Willow) has quit laying eggs. I was afraid we were going to be looking at the possibility of 14-16 babies in that tiny nest! Now that wouldn't have worked at all! I can't imagine that a nest that is only about 4 inches diameter would fit more than perhaps 8-10 inch-long babies, which is how big these things will be when they hatch. I think if they all hatch they're going to be crawling over each other constantly! Hopefully the mass of wiggling bodies won't be tall enough that they end up crawling out of the nest and falling on the floor (ie, possibly breaking necks and dying).

I ordered a matress pad for our baby bassinet. It's the only oval one I could find that was close to the right size, and even so, it is still a few inches too long. We're guessing it will squish in okay though, so it should be fine. It's an awful lot easier than having to make one, anyway! Now I just have to figure out how to pad the edges of the bassinet. Any ideas? I don't even know what one would make the little bumper thingies out of! Perhaps flannelette? Or just plain cotton? There's a lot of really cute stuff out there, or I could just do white, but white stains so easily that it seems it would make more sense to use something coloured... hmmm...

I have also ordered our initial need of diaper covers. Probably a good thing, seeing as currently we only have one cover in the 8-12 lb size range or whatever it is, and then strangely enough, I have ones that will fit a 2(ish) year old. I happened across them in a bunch of stuff we were given... the person who gave them to us apparently used them for panty covers for toilet training though, rather than for cloth diapering. I'm not sure where the little cover came from! Anyway, I ordered one little package of newborn sized ones for the "just in case we need it" thing, and then I ordered two packages of the 0-3 month sized ones, figuring that at that age they are most likely to have very runny messies so probably will need to wash them more often (and thus need more of those!). So, now we have three newborn, and six 0-3 month sized covers on their way, and then we'll see how big the baby is and all that before ordering the next size(s) so we know how many we need of what sizes.

Update on those ten birds eggs as of Thursday morning: There is now one live baby in the nest. Not sure if it will survive, not sure if we're going to have one baby a day for the next ten days... but if it survives, we may be on the start of a very noisy home!