Mother Needs Grief Counselling: Homemade Lovebird Food Recipe by Candi

Squirrely and his dinner. His bathtub is waiting at room temperature just like he likes.

Pumpkinhead is the grieving mother. Worthy of the most succulent fruits of Madagascar.

My lovebirds had a nesting box and laid six eggs which hatched and lived for six days.

The seventh day I decided after much angst and helplessness to make their food from scratch as a way to distract them from the missing babies.

Google research led me to understand that I have all the ingredients for lovebird food right here. Which is a real relief because I didn't want to go to the pet food store to get their pellets because the cashier knows that I am very excited and willing to chat at length about my six lovebird babies. But really she doesn't even have to remember for me to go ahead and have the horrible anxiety leading up to the moment when I can walk out the store door and probably trip over a cement parking block.

So I diced red bell peppers, banana, clementine oranges and sprinkled that mixture with oatmeal and almonds and sesame seeds. Pineapple for dessert which they ate first.

When they dig into the pineapple they look like they're at the third day of Woodstock.

I wish I could give her a massage with my magic balms.

I'm having a much harder time with this than my 8-year old. I think my arrested development is about age 5 and now Sunny is much more mature than me on a gut level. I still know way more Shakespeare trivia than her though.

Sunny's response when I started talking about how to help Pumpkinhead with her next batch of eggs was to yell, "that nesting box was a coffin Mama! Don't you get it?!" So, she's right. The box is gone and now their cage is so open and colorful and full of good foods that they seem to be happy eating.

Sometimes having a baby is not the answer to a mother's sadness. Sometimes a sad mother needs simple pleasures like color and flavors and a perch upon which she can rest her tired talons.