The Terrible Incident of the Hungry Attack Seagull

Of all the kids on all the beaches, this seagull had to choose mine to attack.

Getting Jeffrey onto the beach was a huge feat. He's been afraid of large bodies of water for what seems forever. But on our trip last Christmas to Florida my parents and I tried one day to take him out there and he LOVED it. He ran up and down chasing the water line, collecting seashells...it was great, so the next day we, of course, packed up a days worth of beach things, planning on spending the whole day on the beach. We had towels, bathing suits, an umbrella, drinks, and..this is the kicker - crackers. My mom brought crackers - Cheez-Its.

We got onto the beach without any problems. Jeffrey was excited, playing in the sand, collecting seashells. Then my mom handed him a cracker.

He had it on the tip of his tongue when, from out of what I can only imagine is some sort of bird hell where bird demons go to rest between attacks, an orange beaked, black faced nightmare of a seagull swooped in and literally tried to take the cracker out of his mouth. The whole time it was making that terrifying "CAW CAW CAW" sound and flapping its wings...I'm telling you this bird was DETERMINED to get that cracker. There was probably only millimeters between its nasty orange beak and my son's tongue.

The worst thing though (if it is possible to get worse) is that I could see them make eye contact. Not only did my baby have this demon of a bird trying to pluck out his tongue, he looked in it's terrible eyes and I swear that bird looked back into his CAW CAWing the entire time.

Okay, this is when things go a little crazy.

Of course he screamed and ran away. And of course I ran after him. Sadly, he didn't go anywhere. He just ran in circles, and even more sadly I ran after him, and couldn't catch him. The whole time we were screaming, both of us frantic and in a flurry of those damn black faced demon seagulls swirling all around us.

My mom? She sat there watching us, holding a box of Cheez-Its.

The Asian family sitting a few yards away from us?

They also sat quietly, probably laughing a little, but I was too frantic to notice.

Needless to say, we left the beach that day. We kept trying to go back but it wasn't happening. He even became afraid of just being outside. His eyes would scan the sky for birds and he would run back inside when he saw one.

My Christmas was spent with visions of bee bee guns and bloody black faced, orange beaked birds dancing in my head.

Fast forward a year. He spent the whole year afraid and then one night he happened to see Harry Potter getting pecked by an owl on television.

He ran out of the room and came back with a bird doll, which I hadn't seen in more than a year (I think he'd hidden it somewhere) and then for three days he walked around pretending to peck everything and laughing...

including his own tongue.