Good Days & Bad Days
& more than you wanted to know about birds
I got really into birds in 2024.
It all started when I downloaded the app “Merlin,” which allows users to record audio of a bird in real-time and through birding and technology magic, your phone instantly tells you the species of bird.
Then my devotion to the birds deepened over the summer when I received a series of incredible gifts for my birthday.
My husband built me a hammock in our backyard.1
My parents got me a bird feeder that has a tiny camera in it—and my phone gets both audio and video footage anytime a bird visits.
The remainder of the summer, I lounged in my hammock2 under the shade of a maple, an oak, and a cluster of towering pines—listening and watching for my bird friends to visit.
My first bird feeder guest was a White-Breasted Nuthatch. He stopped by for several days, before letting his bird friends in on the news of the new feeder. Some days there were only crows and more than once Merlin was stumped and couldn’t tell me what bird I was hearing. Under the shade, the ambient temperature was 10-15 degrees cooler than the hot August air, so I was happy to lay there and listen. I discovered that our neighbor’s wind chime plays a tune that sounds exactly like the PJ Masks theme song. Summer afternoons in the hammock reading and waiting for birds are good days. Kendra described it well when she said:
“If I sit there long enough reading, or just being quiet, the birds will come to the feeder right next to me. They’ll like fly right past my head. It’s a bit terrifying, but mostly in an exhilarating way.” —Kendra Adachi on her podcast “The Lazy Genius” episode #383
For Christmas, Adam kept the bird theme going by gifting me essential gear for every serious birder, including binoculars. This allowed me to level up beyond just audio and allow for visual identification of birds.
We are trying to take the kids on “dates” on Saturdays this year. I recently took Declan out for a hike to find some birds. His fantastic imagination allowed him to find several birds in my guidebook that I didn’t see—and he also “saw” a fox. Could be. I wasn’t about to argue with him about it. We did, however, definitely see a House Finch, a Black-Headed Grosbeak, and hear both a Song Sparrow and a Red-Breasted Nuthatch.3
Lest this start sounding like a birding log, let me tell you about the title of this essay.
A few times a week, we fight the busy urge to eat dinner in front of the television or on the go, and find ourselves sitting down to dinner around our dining table.
We take turns sharing highs and lows of our days, which the kids have taken to saying, “Let’s do our good days and bad days.”
Maeve usually chooses the exact current moment we are in—“dinner with my family” as her ‘good day.’ She usually then exclaims, “No bad days!”
Declan sometimes shares something good or bad from the classroom or recess. If he got a good report from a teacher, that is always his high.
Adam and I get to tell a story from our work day—part of our lives that is certainly still abstract to the kids. What do parents do all day anyway?
Life moves quickly and most days are brutally exhausting. It is a marathon from 6 a.m. (when I wake up to Maeve’s knees, or more recently her baby dolls feet, in my back) to 8 p.m. when we finally get the kids put down for bed.
When I was a kid, I described our local Chinese restaurant’s hot and sour soup as “good, but gross.” Something was a little funky about it, but you definitely wanted more. I want my kids to know that each of them and their lives contain multitudes. Life is at the same time good and gross. Life is funky, but you want more. Life is both beautiful and unrelenting. Every single day is a good day and a bad day. We get to choose what we focus on and what we remember. We get to build relationships where we can share both the good days and the bad days, and we get to be our full selves—even our nerdy birding selves. Because nothing can top the good day of catching a hummingbird on your backyard bird cam. That is truly a good day.
The longer story here is that I bought myself a hammock off of Amazon, set it up, the entire family piled on, and within 5 minutes of set up—the whole thing broke and I was no longer in the hammock, but on the grass. Bad day.
While I hammocked, the kids played on the trampoline or in the splash pad or just ran around playing what they call “wild humans.”
Am I supposed to be capitalizing these bird names? Merlin seems to think so, so who am I to argue?