They say that having children offers one a chance to enjoy a "second childhood"...  And I have to say: it's completely true.

Yesterday, after picking the kids up from school, we decided to go feed the ducks on the canal in our neighborhood.  Except we couldn't just go with a bag of stale bread crumbs and feed the ducks all casual-like.  Oh no.  We had to make a mission out of it -- something like a military operation.  To be specific, we had to charter ourselves with a mission to successfully deploy our stale bread crumbs to the ducks without allowing the seagulls to swoop in and steal any of the spoils.

This mission is trickier than you might think.  The seagulls in our neighborhood are quite agile and quite aggressive.  We often have to sacrifice a certain percentage of our "duck food" to the seagulls.  But this time, we decided that we had to take action and devise a special strategy to keep the seagulls away while allowing for successful engagement with the ducks.  One plan that we considered would have involved one of the kids using a baseball bat to threaten the seagulls while the other one fed the ducks... but in the end, we decided on a plan (originally suggested by Elliot) to create a seagull decoy that could be used to play with the minds of the seagulls and trick them into ignoring the bread -- either by scaring the other seagulls away (if they would react to the decoy as a threatening competitor) or by drawing away their interest from where the true action was happening (if they would react to the decoy as a role model and potential leader).

So we trash-picked an old metal drying rack from the curbside in front of our house, and we twisted its metal into the shape of a seagull (more or less).  We lashed the various pieces of the metal together with duct tape.  Then, we used white (and mostly-white) plastic bags to fill out the "flesh" around our metal "skeleton" and create a realistic seagull effect.  An orange "beak" was formed out of a cone of construction paper.  Then the whole seagull decoy was taped into its final form with clear packing tape.  Two eyes were added with a permanent marker.

And if I do say so myself, we did a pretty decent job.

And what's most astonishing of all is that our plan actually worked!  We managed to keep the seagulls from getting all but a couple of scattered bread crumbs, and we fed the ducks (and some swans who happened to come along as well) a royal feast (Elliot and Olivia said that it was their Thanksgiving feast).  You might be tempted to suspect that the seagull decoy didn't have a lot to do with this success -- but the four of us would beg to differ.  There was, in fact, one moment during the ducks' and swans' Thanksgiving feast when the seagulls started timing their swoops more precisely and started terrorizing the guests... But then, we picked up the seagull decoy (which Olivia named "Eee") and made a threatening gesture toward the other seagulls -- at which point they actually did scatter (along with a number of the ducks in closest proximity!) and then stayed away for the rest of our time by the side of the canal (though the ducks did eventually come back).

It was a proud and playful moment with me and the kids... The seagull decoy, by the way, is for hire if anyone else wants to utilize his services some day as you're feeding the ducks in your neighborhood.