JP's football season ended on a rather "muddy" note last year. When we came in from his last game his football cleats were not allowed in the house. I had them put out on the back porch with the intentions of hosing them down at a later time.
Fast forward to now nearly a year later - and guess what? - Those cleats still sit on the back porch waiting to be hosed down. I was rearranging things on the porch and saw something odd with his shoe.
There was a bunch of straw sticking out of it - my first thought was - "why did my son put straw in his shoe?" (If you know JP, that is a valid question)
I picked it up to see if there was an obivious explanation before questioning him and saw that this straw was not just stuffed in there carelessly - but that great care had been taken in arranging each piece of grass, hay, and plastic baggie. A bird had built a nest in those muddy cleats. I started to dump it out, thinking it had served it's purpose and the birds were long gone, but decided to save the shoe to show Randy at a later date.
Two weeks later, the shoe still sat there ( I get sidetracked easily) - I went to grab the shoe to show Randy and when I reached for it a bird came flying out of the shoe! I was so startled - I don't know how I didn't drop the shoe. Good thing I didn't because the shoe now held these:
 
Here's mommy bird on our swing set waiting for me to put the camera away and go back inside. A few days later I was more careful to not touch the shoe and just held my camera up high over the shoe and snapped a quick picture to see what was inside at this point. I caught a picture of mommy bird sitting happily on her eggs. About 2 days later, (about a week ago) I was on the porch to set up Kit Kat's water table when I heard lots of little chirps! I grabbed my camera (of course!) and caught these new little ones waiting on mommy.    Not very pretty at this stage are they? That brings us to today. I heard chirping all day - I kept thinking surely these babies are about ready to fly the nest - I took a picture of the inside of the shoe to see if they were still in there, but the shoe was empty.
 But the chirping was definitely coming from the porch. I walked around the bicycles and when I got to the picnic table it was definitely louder. There was a baby birdie sitting under our picnic table trying to hide in the table cloth. I moved the table cloth and the bird ran - to a corner of the yard to hide. (but we have 3 dogs out there!)
  On a mission to save the birdie Randy and I tried to corner it into a box but it ran underneath the fence to the front side of our house under a set of bushes, and we just let it go at that point. At least our dogs couldn't get a hold of it. This was the best full shot of the bird I was able to get, but we were trying to get it in the box so it turned out blurry.
 Here it is going under our fence So our little bird adventure has come to an end, and to think it all started with some muddy football cleats on our back porch.
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No way! That is the funnest set of pictures. Too bad it isn't a video, it would get tons of hits on youtube! We once had a pumpkin vine grow up a pine tree. The darn pumpkins looked like they were growing from the tree. All the neighbors came to check it out. Thanks for sharing the precious gift in the shoe.