Relative Suffering - Compared to a goose

I have not posted here in a while. I have been sick. See the Peanut blog for details, but in one quick word - pregnancy.
The Peanut blog documents my many, many, many weeks of suffering under the spell of morning sickness due to baby.
Everything from smells, to traveling, to vomitting. I could not believe women all over the world purposely lent themselves to the condition of 1st trimester pregnancy over and over again. I think I was only 2 weeks into the morning sickness when I looked over at Alex and said, "I'm not very good at this. I don't like it. I don't know if I'll be doing it again." Yes, I am a whiner, the biggest, most annoying, most unrelenting whiner of them all (just ask Alex).

But the other day, I realized, I do not have it so bad.

Around our office property we have wild life - well, semi-wild life. We have geese. We have a male and female who mated. The female started building a nest. She could not gather enough twigs, nor any other decent nesting material so she decided to fill in the gaps between her few scraps of a twig nest with her feathers. She laid 7 eggs.

If you've been watching the news, or have stepped outside the last couple of days, you know that it's been quite windy around here. The mother goose sat on her nest deligently, protecting and incubating her eggs for as long as her hunger pangs would let her (the male goose was no where to be found....eh-hem). Eventually, she had to get up to feed. She could hold out no longer.

Wouldn't you know it, the nest of feathers blew away in the wind promptly as she got up. 3 of her eggs came spilling out of the now dismantled nest onto the ground of rocks. She had to eat. There was no way to recover feathers in the wind to rebuild or fix her broken nest. She went off to hunt.

She came back a while later, her eggs still sitting on rock, and sat back down on the 4 eggs that managed to stay together. She tried to stretch herself as wide as she could in an effort to cover the 3 that had rolled away a few inches from the bunch, but it was no use. The weather turned for the worst. The temperature dropped 15 degrees, the winds continued to howl, and then to make things worse....it began to rain on her.

When I returned to the office after the weekend, the mother was no where to be found. She had abandoned the eggs. She didn't come back once to even look at them again. At the end of the day, I saw the female goose walking around with the male again, making loud, loud noise - were they fighting over the destruction of the nest and whose fault it was? It was a 'domestic'...definitely, I could tell. It was not friendly 'quacking'.