What We Do (a mommy tale)

If your daughter brings you a baby bird and hopes that you'll help her figure out what to feed it, and if the baby is cute and feathery and rather desperate looking, and if, all day, you try different things and it never will eat but finally, at nightfall, you realize that what it really needs is a mom to eat a worm and partially digest it and then throw it up into the baby's mouth, and this gives you an idea so you get a very fat grub from the garden and you smash it in the old brass mortar and pestle that was your mother's and then you suck the grub juice up in an eye dropper and find that the baby will now very happily open it's mouth for this delicacy--Well, I just want to warn you that you need to cover the top of the mortar with something while you're doing the smashing or else you might get grub juice on your face.  I'm just sayin...