Small Furry Animal Alert!

Warning: this household now contains one bunny and a desperately happy 9-year-old!

Amy and Muffin

After Toffee died last year ... okay that might require some explaining:

Toffee was put down in April last year. At the time I just did a status update on Facebook, but couldn't face sitting down and writing about it in any detail. Even now I'm just cutting and pasting from an email I sent to a friend rather than rehashing the whole thing too much. Basically she was a big, strong girl who was also awfully anxious and in spite of everything we tried to do to help her she continued to get worse. Her happy space was at home with us, where she was a lovely, playful, affectionate pet (which made the decision to have her put down extremely painful), but she wanted the rest of the world to go away. It was bad enough when she would bark at people when we were out for walks, but then she started biting as well - not biting down hard but grabbing people with her mouth, which was scary enough for the people she went for and got her kicked out of doggy daycare - and we couldn't leave things any longer until she really hurt someone. As it is there's a little girl up the road who is now terrified of all dogs because Toffee jumped our fence and cornered her in her garden one day :( For a long time we had a house I just didn't want to be in because it felt so empty.

Anywho, this is a happy blog entry, honest! Where was I? Right. After Toffee died I told the kids that another pet wouldn't even be up for discussion until the end of that year. No, they did not manage to wait that long! Amy had her heart set on a bunny. So we told her that if she saved up her pocket money she could buy one herself, once she had enough, and we'd take care of organising a rabbit hutch for it. Given that my darling daughter has inherited her mother's childhood compulsive-spending sweet-toothed pocket-money-burning-holes-in-pockets tendencies, we didn't see that happening anytime soon. And it didn't. And Amy got increasingly agitated. Eventually we worked out that she couldn't see the point of saving her pocket money until Daddy built a rabbit hutch, and Daddy couldn't see the point of building a rabbit hutch until Amy started saving her pocket money. This was all rapidly getting us nowhere! I occasionally suspect that our kids don't quite trust us. This was one of those moments. I asked her to concentrate on doing her part and please trust us with taking care of the rest. We actually ended up buying a hutch to save Ross the frustration of trying to build one without a proper work-shop, and to solve the problem of what to build it out of that would be weather-proof but still safe for bunny to nibble on. I'm so very glad we did - the one we've got is a heck of alot easier to clean than anything we would have constructed.

I have to say, we didn't plan to get the fur-ball on the first day of the school holidays, but it worked out that way. Stroke. Of. Genius. Best school holidays in ... ever :)

He's ever-so-slightly obsessive and we've had to block off all the gaps between the furniture because he's hell-bent on getting into the corner behind the television. He is also, however, pretty much terrified of the wooden floor, which means that when he's inside he stays on his little rug or in his cardboard box. He tried to make a run for it across the wood a few times - no traction, much hilarity :D