A young child wearing a denim jacket and navy blue hat adorned with a pink flower, standing in front of a brick wall background. 2:19
CBS Sunday Morning channel icon CBS Sunday MorningOriginal creator 1.2M views Save

“I'm his mom,” says Kylie, 5, of her pet duck

Some kids go to the park to see the ducks. Five-year-old Kylie Brown of Freeport, Maine, brings her own. more

His name is Snowflake. He swims around the pond, then comes back when he's called, because as far as he's concerned, Kylie is his mother. “I'm his mom,” she tells reporter Steve Hartman. Told that she isn't really his mom, she holds her ground. “Yep, I'm his mom.”

Hartman tries another question. “How did you first find out,” he begins, and Kylie jumps in to finish it for him. “That he was a duck?” No, that was not the question. Kylie is unbearably cute, he admits, and he never did recover enough to ask it again.

A young child wearing a denim jacket and navy blue hat adorned with a pink flower, standing in front of a brick wall background. The headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
Some kids go to the park to see the ducks.

The answer he was after is that Snowflake latched on from his first day with the Browns. For whatever reason, the duck imprinted on Kylie and had to be at her side, no matter the hour.

When Snowflake refused to stay in the backyard, Kylie's parents, Ashley and Mike, say they had no choice. They put him in a diaper and made him a house duck. Now he goes everywhere ducks are allowed, and almost everywhere they're not.

As one parent puts it, some toddlers won't leave the house without a blankie. Kylie won't leave without her duck, and “at that point, nothing's negotiable.”

A child sits in a car seat while an adult holds her, and a duck stands beside her on the seat. A headline runs in white letters across the lower third.Save
Wherever Kylie goes, Snowflake goes too, car rides included.

So Snowflake goes to the beach in summer and sledding in winter. He has been to soccer practice and on sleepovers. One Halloween he went trick-or-treating as Olaf, the snowman from “Frozen.”

The two of them sincerely believe they belong together. Even at 5, Kylie already shows the kind of person she is going to be. She'll make a great mom someday, mostly because she already is.

There is one catch, and Hartman brings it up. Someday, Snowflake is going to grow up and go to college. Kylie's reply is one word. “What?”