I promised the story of my duck attack this week, so here it goes! This week started as a stressful one. Nic had midterms and finals for school, so we had some really late nights and early mornings. By Wednesday afternoon, we were thrashed. Nic had finished his exams and we were ready for a break. As we sat quietly at our little table eating dinner, I could see it in Nic's eyes. He needed to get out. He'd been cooped up inside studying for a week, and he was just done with it. He's definitely got that adventure spirit in him, and he's been itching to work on his photography skills. So, mid-dinner, I suggested going on a quick photo adventure. Defeated, he replied, "But, the sun is starting to go down. We just can't." PERFECT. Pictures are PERFECT just as the sun starts to go down! So I, very easily, convinced him to scarf down the rest of dinner, and we hauled it out to the car, not entirely sure where we were going. We were simply going OUT.
As we drove, Nic had an idea of where he wanted to go, and we were racing the sun. On the way to this mystery destination, we started to drive by Rymill Park. We'd been there once or twice before when it was still kind of cold. But, NOW it was gorgeous! Rose gardens, lush pergolas, paths lined with trees. We parked like crazy Americans and ran into the park searching for perfect picture locations. There were so many!
We had a blast just walking through the park taking pictures of all the things we saw. Nic is loving learning to use my camera, and he's doing so well! As we started to get closer to the river, we began to see all kinds of ducks. Nic got some great, sharp photos of one particularly brave duck that came and just posed himself a few feet from where we sat. He was quite the model duck, and we had fun snapping some photos of him.
At this point it was starting to get dark. We were feeling pretty good about our little outing, so we decided to slowly make our way back to the car when we came across a cute family of ducks. We kindly kept our distance and let the ducks mosey along on their way. As they approached the river, Daddy Duck plopped himself into the water. One baby duck followed as the other baby ducks just sat there at the edge. It was a little strange, as I expected all of them to kind of follow. I then noticed Daddy Duck attacking the little duck that had gone in after him. He grabbed on to it and was pulling it under the water. "What on earth?!" My "mama bear instincts" stepped in and I hustled over to the edge of the river and squatted down to try and help the poor little thing. But, I couldn't reach it! As I started to stand up again, out of NOWHERE, the mama duck came at me! Her wings hit my head and I jumped up and screamed. It scared me to death! I was just so focused on helping this little duck! Meanwhile, Nic is getting quite a chuckle out of my ridiculous scene. (He was paying close enough attention to know that I was fine.) We're just bummed that he didn't catch a picture of it! After pondering the situation, we THINK the little duck that was attacked was not a part of their family, so they were booting him out. He made it out alive, and swam off to the other side of the river. Poor little guy!
Although, the night ended in terror (for me), the overall evening was a great success! I caught some of my favorite location photos to date, and Nic caught some really fun ones as well. Wednesday night was a big win in our books!