The Trouble With Bunnies

This week my life has been overwhelmed with bunnies. I have endured plagues of flies, frogs and mice in previous residences, so by comparison, bunnies seem unthreatening. It being spring and our local Thumper's being "twitterpated" we have steadily watched the rabbit population grow. The adults, (pictured here just outside my sliding glass door) are pretty cute. The fluffy babies with their big eyes and ridiculous ears are adorable.

Chewie has a two fold fascination with the rabbits. He both wants to study them and hunt them. As I said before it is spring and the rabbits are twitterpated. Chewie being the dispassionate scientist he is attentively watched and then retold his observations when a pair of rabbits completed their mating ritual right outside our door. Last week he checked a book out on cottontails, so he was able to not only give me the details on what he observed, but also the gestation period, the length of time the mother would be required to tend her little ones before they could get back to being "twitterpated" again. I have been a little nervous as to how to have "the talk" with him. I am unsure how much he will understand and be able to relate to. I see now that we just need to approach this from an anthropological standpoint, or maybe I will just get him a book.

When he is not studying the rabbits for the betterment of science, he is trying to catch one so we can eat it. They just finished a unit in their Colorado history class on mountain men. Chewie has decided this is the ideal way of life. One solitary man against the wilderness whose only goal is survival. To help him out on his lifelong goal to be a modern day Jeremiah Johnson he has decided he needs hunting skills. When I flat out denied him buying a gun, he started to get creative trying to catch them with his hands, a rope and even attempting to train our cat (who is terrified of the rabbits by the way) to attack and then bring the rabbit back to him. He sat out on our tiny patio with Chester (the cat) petting him and giving him a pep talk by saying "remember you are a predator, rabbits are your prey" Chester remains unconvinced.

Riley found an infant rabbit next to our car yesterday. It was about the size of a mouse, blind and mostly hairless. His tender heart could not stand to see it left out alone, and he wanted to adopt it. I convinced him to put it back near it's den, and that the mother would come back to take care of it. It continued to climb out of it's den all afternoon. He would go out every 10-15 min to check on it and had to put it back in. He cried and cried and begged me to let him bring it inside. Finally we googled it and I found an article that convinced him that the mother would return at sunset to feed and look after her babies. That wild rabbits do fine on their own and do not need human help ( there are only 5 billion of them in our complex alone). This morning he went out to check on it on his way to the bus stop. It was dead. It is at times like this that I wish there was an emergency happy pill for depression. I was able to get him mentally sound enough to get on the bus and head to school, and I hope there he will have enough things to occupy his brain so he doesn't obsess about it and get really depressed.

Mr T has been driving me up the wall this week. He is like a 2 yr old constantly getting into trouble. He is bored and needs something to do. I am beginning to suspect he is responsible for the bunnies in the garage. Friday I went to grab something out of the freezer in the garage, and found three baby bunnies hopping around in the garage. Cute fluffy hoppy bunnies the size of rats, not blind helpless ones. I wondered how they got in there, opened the garage a crack to let them out and went on my way. Well yesterday it happened again. Again I opened the garage to let them out, but this time I said "how do these bunnies keep getting into the garage!"

MrT came running downstairs and said "why do you keep letting them out!", but then he clammed up and wouldn't admit to putting them in there. It would not surprise me that while Chewie was slowly plotting to teach the cat to hunt for him, Mr T learned how to herd them into the garage for his own amusement.

A lady at the store asked me the other day what it was like to have 3 boys. I told her "never a dull moment"