If you think this blog is funny, read Any Given Mom, Any Given Day
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I hesitate to admit this openly, but I have a psychic power. If I visualize certain things coming to me, they almost always appear in my life. Frustratingly, those things are almost always animals.
Here is a case in point: My younger son, Jack, has always wanted a pet bunny but until recently I resisted. Then I realized that since we already take care of five dogs, ten (barn) cats, three cows, and a flock of chickens, taking care of one more critter couldn't add that much work. So I started checking the Craigslist pet section for a free bunny, as I have noticed that people sometimes give away pet bunnies complete with the cage and the whole setup.
However, I did not undertake the search for a bunny very earnestly, as we have had a busy summer. In fact, I wasn't searching at all when my husband came home from work two weeks ago and said the strangest thing had happened. One of his co-workers had emailed him out of the blue and offered him a pet bunny, complete with a hutch.
When my husband found out I had actually been thinking about getting a bunny, he said "Will you please stop using your power on bunnies and concentrate on the lottery?!?!?" However, he quickly became resigned to the situation, and we trundled off one evening in my truck to pick up the bunny and the hutch. Or so we thought.
We arrived at his co-worker's house, which was in a very upscale neighborhood, and quickly saw why they wanted out of the bunny business. The bunny himself was a gentle black rabbit with extremely large back feet and powerful hind legs (more on that later), while the hutch was a hulking piece of makeshift carpentry that even two men together could not lift. It looked completely out of place in their landscaped back yard; further, his teenage children had lost interest in their pet.
There was no point in us trying to move the hutch, even if we had really wanted it, which we did not: This is the kind of thing you'd be better off burning where it stands. Anyway, we stuffed the bunny, which my younger son quickly renamed "King McFluffins," into a dog kennel and drove home.
King McFluffins is a good companion for Jack, who likes to hold the bunny on his lap. I also bought a little dog harness and leash that we can put on King McFluffins, so sometimes Jack takes him for a hop around the yard.
My vet told me that rabbits can easily get heat stressed in our climate, so yesterday we got an indoor cage and set it up in the mud room. You would think that it would be easy to transition a cute, harmless bunny to life indoors...however, this is life on the farm after all, where entropy often rears its ugly head.
My husband went out to the barn with Jack to get King McFluffins from the stall where we had been keeping him. The weather has been terrible here lately, rain almost every day for two weeks. It seems everything is damp and muddy, including King McFluffins' paws. I had my doubts when my husband suggested putting him in the kitchen sink for a quick wash of his paws and belly, but I didn't have a better solution.
Here is my advice if you are considering putting a full grown rabbit in your kitchen sink and spraying him with the little hose nozzle spray thingy: Don't try it. It can only result in great unhappiness. King McFluffins went from passive fluffball to raging terror in a split second. He kicked so wildly that my husband had to let him go for a moment, and the next thing we knew there was muddy water everywhere and King McFluffins had broken a wine glass that happened to be sitting on the counter several feet away (and no, in case you are wondering, I was not bathing bunnies under the influence, although in retrospect that might not have been a been idea...).
Eventually we got everything settled down and King McFluffins is now enjoying his indoor cage, with jaunts outside to nibble at clover. Meanwhile, I am trying a new tactic to hone my power: I am visualizing King McFluffins at the Powerball prize ceremony, King McFluffins on a cruise, King McFluffins paying off the farm... hey, it's worth a try.
If you think this blog is funny, read Any Given Mom, Any Given Day
on Amazon
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