There is a house in our neighborhood that has some sort of shelving on the porch and on the shelves are all different kinds of bird houses. I’m not sure if they meant this as a decoration or they just never hung up their bird houses but I thought it was really cute. So I decided that I wanted to do something similar in our back yard. I decided I wanted a bird house collage on one of our trees. So I bought a number of different bird houses from the craft stores to paint at home. One day I had some other painting to do so I gave one to Ella to paint…

I think she did a pretty good job! (Her’s is the top one that has the heart shaped hole.)

While she was painting her bird house we had the usual conversations that you have with a 2 year old. Why were we doing this? Why did the birds need houses? Did I think the birds would like the house? And then she said to me, ” The big birds no fit in this house. We need a big house for the big birds.” She was certainly right! Probably out of my dislike of birds I bought the smallest houses I could find. The bigger the house, the bigger the bird, the bigger the bird poop, right? And so since we want to teach Ella love and acceptance of all types of people (and birds) the next day we trekked off to the craft store to purchase a larger bird house….

A little more sparsely painted but just as beautiful and it made Ella feel better about the world. I realize these aren’t the kinds of bird houses the birds will actually live in but I love that this is the direction her little mind took and that she was genially concerned about this.

So this past weekend we hung our bird houses up. Across the yard we hung up our bird feeder…

As my husband was putting feed in the feeder Ella asked him to put feed in the other bird houses. He explained to her that this was like their kitchen….she didn’t bring up the fact that the kitchen wasn’t actually in the bird’s houses but I was fully prepared to bring out the summer kitchen explanation of days gone by. She was happy with his answer and left it at that.

So here is our bird house collage tree with bird houses painted by Ella, myself and a number of friends and we are hoping to add to it as time goes on.