Multiplying like Rabbits....

Is it just me or are a lot of people getting pets recently?

I swear everyday one of my friends posts a picture on Facebook or Instagram of their new puppy, kitten, iguana, bird, chinchilla, or hedgehog (I actually know someone who has a hedgehog btw. So cute to look at but not too cute to hold or when he's running around his cage at 4am when you just got back from a DMB concert 2 hours before and are slightly intoxicated and all you want to do is sleep.). Maybe it's something about the summer months, or maybe this is typical breeding time? Not sure, but not kidding you, 4 of my friends got puppies this week. Each is incredibly adorable and I desperately want to set up puppy play-dates just to cuddle the cuteness.



This is my friend Meg's new baby Obie. He's a pitbull mix

Being bombarded with all this cuteness, got me thinking about pets in general. And the pets I've had over the course of my 27 years.

My parents are NOT dog people. At all. Neither ever had a dog, had interest in getting a dog or really even like being around them for extended periods of time. In fact, growing up my mom never had a pets--9 kids and 2 live-in grandmothers was enough "animals" to feed and clothe, and there was always a new baby on the way. An animal wasn't brought into her house period until her youngest brother rescued a black kitten from beneath a car and my grandmother let him keep her for a few weeks--he named her Prudence (he really liked the Beatles at the time) and she caught mice in their basement. But at that point, my mom was already living on her own and still had no desire for pets. There was no love lost on either end for her.

My dad is another story.

He loves animals. Always has. He never had a dog or cat when he was young--my grandparents aren't dog people either--but he still had a plethora of "unusual pets". He had frogs and turtles, usually caught from the creek down the road. He kept them in little tubs in the backyard and knew better than to try and bring them inside. The only pet my grandfather actually bought his kids was always around Easter--he liked to put live chicks and ducklings in his kids Easter baskets every year. He liked to see the joy and surprise on his kids face as they saw the real animals crawling around the inside of  the Easter baskets. He even made a little pond in their backyard in New Jersey to house the ducklings. When they got too big--or when it was about to snow and the couldn't live outside anymore--he usually dropped them off at a local farm (with the prerequisite from his children that their "pets" could not be eaten). It was a cute little tradition.

We grew up with a combination of both mentalities.

My mom was never okay with us having pets. She never had a sit down with my dad and said, "Bob, let's get the girls a nice pet. It will teach them responsibility and mold their characters." And when the pets suddenly started to appear, she'd piss and moan for about a week then ignore their presence altogether. As long as the pet didn't live in the house, mess up her furniture, and was pretty self-sufficient she was passive about it. And I guess my Dad knew that because slowly we started getting more and more pets.

First it was just fish. My dad had a massive fish tank filled with goldfish in our basement. They were his pride and joy. He like buying all the little gadgets to decorate the tank and was constantly on the look-out for new supplies. And everything was great until my cousin Brian accidentally knocked the tank light and heater behind the tank, which caused the water to basically boil overnight and kill all the fish. My dad said he came downstairs the next morning and the lone survivor of the "fish boil" was slamming himself into the tank wall--trying to kill itself.

That was the end of fish for a while.

After that we had a mixed bunch of pets. Hermit crabs from the Jersey shore--that usually died before the summer was out or somehow got sucked up into our vacuum cleaner and never seen again (true story). Hamsters--which my dad made the HUGE mistake of buying 4, one for each of us, and not checking to see if they were all the same sex; needless to say we ended up with about 17 of them and almost all the kids on our block took one home that year. Gerbils--I guess my dad was scared straight after the hamster fiasco and decided to go with their long-tailed cousins and only got us 2, both males. Our house always seemed to be filled with a lot of cages and tanks. And if something died or escaped, my dad would simply replace it with something new. The pet store was actually one of my dad's favorite "Sunday Adventure" spots--my mom worked night work at the hospital when we were young, so my dad always took us out all day Sunday so she could sleep. It was mostly window shopping, and once in a while actually holding of a puppy, but it was fun all the same.

The one constant in my house, as far as pets go, were rabbits.

There isn't a time in my childhood that I don't remember us having at least 2 bunnies running around our yard. I'm not sure how it started--probably from another "Sunday Adventure"--but my dad liked to take us to this little farm up the street from us where they sold bunnies. They literally had two rows of at least 30 hutches of bunnies you could pick from. My dad would take the 4 of us there every spring--if we were bunny-less at the time-- and let us pick 2 to bring home. I remember walking up and down the rows for what seemed like hours, looking at and trying to decide which one deserved to come home with me. He had to be a certain color--we stayed away from brown bunnies for some reason-- floppy ears and size. It really became a science for me and my sisters. Finally, we picked our two and we'd whisk them home and to our own Daddy-made bunny hutch in our backyard.

So cute!

We'd play outside with them for hours and hours. Feeding them carrots and celery, chasing them around the yard, stroke their floppy ears and just love on them. Once they were accustomed to us and their new surroundings, they tended to run away and outside of the yard. Which is always when I stepped in. My dad used to call me his "Rabbit Runner" because if they got outside the yard, I was always able to catch and bring them home. I still remember how I did it--I'd sneak up behind the bunny, almost in a lion stance when they are stalking their prey, and pounce when they weren't looking. If I didn't catch them within the first 5 minutes, it simply couldn't be done.

Besides going out to the farm to choose, my dad had another creative way of surprising us with bunnies every year. One that he drew from his own childhood.

Like his father, my dad lived for surprising us on the holidays. He loved to see our faces go from 0 to 60 in seconds. Christmas is usually the big one--there's always something up his sleeve even to this day; last year he surprised us with a remote control car track (don't ask the inspiration behind that one as he has 4 girls and we're all in our 20's now, but he figured we could all play with it the whole day. Which naturally we did!). As Easter is sort of a lack-luster holiday, he always tried to liven it up. My mom usually worked night on Saturdays when we were young, so my dad was usually on his own when it came to pre-Easter festivities. He dyed the eggs with us, set out of baskets, watched endless hours of Peter Cottontail, and made sure our Easter dresses were ironed and ready for church the next morning. But his favorite part of Easter-Eve was setting up our very own "Easter Bunny Trap".

It looked kind of like this

I guess this started because of us setting out milk, cookies and carrots for Santa and his reindeer on Christmas--and we didn't want the Easter Bunny to be left out, as he is on the same magical realm as Santa--but every year we tried to catch the Easter Bunny. He'd set it up right in our living room, do a few practice tries and leave a little sign from us for the Easter Bunny to read. "Alright girls, time for bed. We won't catch him if you're down here watching," he'd tell us. We'd all immediately run upstairs and try to sleep; so excited about what would come the next morning.

Easter morning was always a bit of a rush to get up and to church on time. But we always made sure we were up in time to check our baskets. We'd rush down the stairs--after finally getting permission to do so from my parents--and bee-line it for our baskets. My sisters and I really aren't candy people, so typically we got little toys in our baskets. My dad was always a silent observer in the background with the video camera, just watching as we dug into our baskets. And for some reason he always had to remind us to check the Bunny Trap. We'd remember and rush to the box--that was always conveniently slammed shut and waiting with a surprise. After a few tense moments, we'd lift the box timidly to see what happened. The box would shift a little, showing tiny paws beneath it, and we'd let it drop again with a shriek of "WE GOT HIM!!" Then we'd lift the box completely and a small bunny would be beneath it. We'd clap and scream, passing our new bunny from sister to sister and my dad would just laugh and say, "Told you we'd catch him!"  Every year we caught the Easter Bunny and he lived with us because we were such good girls.

Probably one of the cutest memories I have of childhood.

We had bunnies constantly until I was about 12 and my mom finally relented and let us keep a stray cat from the neighborhood--Tiger. He was an orange, fluff of love and furr. More like a human than an animal. Seriously the best cat in the world and I was devastated when he died 4 years ago. And that was when this little ball of orange furr came into my life.

Charlie

It's always hard getting a new pet after a beloved one has died, and he certainly isn't Tiger but he's cute all the same. He's also kind of a dick and pretty obnoxious--I'm not kidding you, he likes to jumps from behind walls and try and scare you when you are walking into a room, or run through your legs when you are walking down the stairs, and he kind of likes to attack my ankles every time I'm walking around him--but he's cute all the same. My sister and I want to get him a baby brother to play with, but I know my mom would kill me. Maybe one day....

I definitely think a dog is somewhere in my near future. They're just too cute to pass up. I've been very close to buying one in the last few years, but while I'm still living at home I have to abide by my parents rules: NO DOGS ALLOWED!

Until then, I'll just live vicariously through my friends :)