Animal/ Zoo stuff

Happy Easter! The Easter Bunny stopped, er, hopped by today for Ava’s first Easter. Here he is visiting with our 2 baby chicks: “Nuna” and “Lydia”.

Actually it’s one of our Flemish Giant Rabbits “Munroe” but he might as well be the Easter bunny. He weighs more than Ava does!

Munroe is very used to being photographed with kids as he is one of our star animals in our shows. Everyone loves him, he’s a great bunny. Believe it or not, Ava is not the youngest child to have her photo with him. Last week, a tiny little baby who was only a couple weeks old had his photo beside Munroe!

Ava just loves all the animals we have here, and thank goodness for that! She’s got her own little zoo here of about 75 animals! The hedgehogs still scare her though…

But look!! The Easter Bunny did come and left Ava some pretty nifty things for her to find this morning. Poor baby is sick with a cold but I think she perked up a little when she saw her new stuff. Check out those vtech toys – looks like the bunny discovered the great sale that Toys R Us had going recently- buy 1 vtech toy, get one free!! And that blue Easter basket? That was mine when I was little! My mum made that for me and I found it last year at my parents house while I was visiting. Now it is passed on to Ava 🙂

With sad hearts and tears rolling down our cheeks we said goodbye to our sweet little rat Stanley this morning. Yes a rat. He was the friendliest rat I’ve ever come across and he lived well beyond the life expectancy of an average of 1-2 years. Stanley was almost 3 years old. When we got him, he was so tiny – only a couple weeks old. He was brought into our classroom one day by one of our classmates looking to give him to someone to feed to a reptile. Both Steve and I fell in love with him so he became the very first pet that we got together. We had our own pets already but Stanley was the first “joint” pet. We were still in our first year of EATM, then the next year Stanley’s photo was on one of the tables at our wedding for the table number card, and he made the long cross country journey with us to our new home. He has also made many appearances in our animal shows, and he’s put a lot of smiles on people’s faces. I hope that he has made lots of people realize just how sweet rats can be.

Stanley-man, you will be dearly missed. He has left behind 8 daughters though for us to love and remember him by. Hopefully they will be as sweet as their daddy and delight people as much as he did. The girls are 3 months old now so we will start them in shows soon. 8 daughters and table #8 was Stanley’s table at the wedding. 🙂

In other news, my online classes will be starting in the next couple weeks. If you’d like to join please email me. I have gotten many many emails and I have not responded to all yet, so if you haven’t yet heard from me, you will! I promise! Things have just been very hectic around here.

We have all been sick, on and off. There always seems to be something around here. It seems there is an endless amount of cleaning, dishes and laundry that has to be done. Something is wrong with our dryer so we’ve been without for almost 2 months now. There are more important things (like bills) that take priority over that so fixing the dryer will just have to wait for now. It is afterall more of a luxury as the clothes will dry on their own if they are hung up. I have to admit I do not miss the dryer as much as I thought I would. I’m even looking forward to the nicer weather so we can put up a small clothesline in our backyard.

We mostly use cloth diapers for Ava and we use cloth wipes for everything. Those are the best things ever! We now have a small supply of them in every room as they come in handy for everything. But since we have a lot of them, it means a lot of them in the laundry and I’m running out of places to hang them to dry. So they get hung all over the place, thankfully they dry quite quick. Here is a tutorial I did on how to make these awesome cloth wipes here. We have gone papertowel-less now in the house too. I’m so happy we did this as it was such a huge waste of money and waste in general using paper towels. It’s SO much better for the environment to not use paper towels too. We use larger cloth wipes and crocheted dish cloths in the kitchen now.

Hope everyone is having a great week!

No, it’s not our daughter Ava – she’s not due for another couple months. But we do have another new baby that we recently added to our family… it’s a little white nosed Coati (AKA Coatimundi). We’ve had him just about a week now and he’s almost 3 weeks old. I really am in love all over again. We named him “Twitch” because he twitches a lot in his sleep. We’ve actually been on a waiting list for this little guy since January and we were just informed by this small zoo near us that he was available for us last week. Because he is being bottle fed every 2-3 hours, he goes everywhere with us right now. It’s a good thing we can take him to work with us 🙂  We have already turned into paranoid new parents! Not wanting to leave him, making anyone who touches him wash their hands first, waking up the first few nights every hour just to check on him; oh yes, I’m sure we’ll be even worse when Ava gets here.

Last night was the first time we left him for a couple hours. We went over to our local movie theater (which is exactly a 4 minute drive from our house) to see the movie “What to Expect When You’re Expecting”.  We fed him before we left and made sure he was asleep then we rushed home after the movie and he was still asleep! Whew! haha

Someone asked me a couple days ago what the typical day is like for us. There really are several “typical” days, depending on if we have shows to do, how many shows, and if we have a day off from shows. We are very thankful to be so busy right now with work, and right now we really only have 1 full day off a week. Not really a day off though, as there are always a ton of things to do around here.

So here is our typical day with shows:

Depending on the time of our first show and how long it will take us to get there, we get up at least 2-3 hours before we have to leave. Sometimes that means a very early start to the day, and takes us back to our days in the EATM program when we used to get up before the sun did.

Steve and I divide up the morning duties and we get to work. The dogs and Norman (the pig) go outside first then get their breakfasts. Now that baby Coati is with us, he also usually eats around this time too, depending on the time. He wakes up once during the night for a bottle, then sleeps until about 6:30 when he cries again for another. He’ll be up again between 8:30-9:30 for another feeding and a little bit of playtime.

Next is feeding for all the other animals: all 50 of them. They all get fed, waters filled, cleaning as needed, handling if we don’t have to rush to a show, and some get to go outside if the weather is nice. (Rabbits can run in the backyard, tortoise has an outdoor enclosure on the lawn, etc).

This continues until it’s time to get ready to leave for shows. Depending on which animals are coming with us, we get them into their carriers, makes sure we have water bottles and snacks for both us and all the animals, then we start loading them into the vehicle.

Throughout the day between shows, the animals with us are offered water, snacks and for Norman, walks. The funniest thing is when we are downtown Chicago (which is very often) and we need to walk Norman. Many times the only places we can stop to let him out is at some inner city park or even a grassy boulevard. He gets so much attention from people – who are just amazed that we are following a pig around with a poop bag!

Once we get back home, we put all the animals away, feed those again who need it, make sure waters are all full, then feed the nocturnal animals. Depending on what time it is, we cover the parrots cages as they like to go to bed between 6-7pm each night. Then as we’re finishing checking on everyone else, the 3 parrots do their nightly routine of chanting “Night Night!” really loud for about 10 minutes, followed by one of them laughing (kinda a creepy laugh too!).

Time for the dogs and Norman to go out for another walk, then get their dinner. Baby Twitch gets another bottle (and he gets bottles throughout the day while we’re on the road too). One of our bearded dragons is on 2 different antibiotics for an infection in her foot. Poor thing, we have to give her both an injection and oral meds every day! It’s been a month so far but our vet was here the other day and he wants to keep her on it for 2 more months! We hate having to give her a needle each day but she is so good and she knows now that she gets her favorite super worms after as a treat.

Next is getting all the paperwork done from the day and getting more paperwork done for the shows for the next day. After everything is done, we basically fall into bed and are asleep within 30 minutes. Twitch gets another bottle and he loves to snuggle with us so we let him while we watch something on tv, then its time to sleep for us all.

If we don’t have any shows our day starts and ends the same but we run errands during the day or we do extensive cleaning and lots of animal handling. Steve is also building bigger enclosures for some of our lizards that are getting larger.

One thing is for sure, there is never a dull moment around our house! Whether we are tripping over a dog, scrambling after a ferret who is running for the bedroom, or chasing Norman through the house because he grabbed a box out of the recycling bin and has it in his mouth ready to tear apart, there is always something!

Speaking of Norman, he is almost 10 months old now and weighs 23 pounds! He is slightly bigger than Zoey (the largest of the 3 dogs) but all the dogs still rule over the pig. Norman is getting so much better about not getting into stuff around the house now, but we are also better at not leaving stuff out for him – we’ve finally piggy-proofed the house! His latest favorite place to be is on the couch. I was looking for him the other evening and found him sound asleep on the couch. He had even covered himself with the throw blanket and just his hooves were sticking out. Quite hilarious.

So that’s a little glimpse into our life. We’re usually exhausted, but we love what we do and we’re happy.

Norman buried himself under this blanket.

Bottles now line out countertops. His favorite is the Dr. Brown’s bottle.

Yay! Our backyard is all fenced in now!

Moose giving Twitch a kiss