Sure signs of Spring

One of the things I love most about spring is the baby animals.

Our parakeets are joining in this year. I'm not sure what hit them, we have had them for several years, but all of the sudden this year they decided "Hey, let's pro-create!"

It all started with this little dude back in March.


He's all grown up now. He was instantly claimed by PK and named Mickey (Can you tell we had just come back from Disney World? LOL)He is a gorgeous mixture of his parents, green, tempered with soft blue. He's really very pretty.

Sadly our little Mickey is handicapped. He was attacked by the other adult female in the cage (She was removed to another cage). We believe she broke his leg, and it healed incorrectly which leaves him without the use of his right foot. He also has a damaged left wing and is unable to grow flight feathers on that wing which means our little Mickey flies like a rock! He doesn't let it slow him down though and I believe he will live a long and happy life.(If you look closely in the background you can see Hermione's cage inside the birdhouse but we had to take her out because even in a separate cage she would not stop picking on the baby, who with his crippled leg found the top of her cage the easiest place to perch. She would reach through the bars and pull his feathers out, or pick at his little feet. I don't know why she is so mean to him.)


No sooner was little Mickey out of the nest than Stormy laid more eggs. This time around we got not one, but THREE babies! Sadly one of the little ones didn't make it, but we now have Cricket who hatched on 4-28

And Squeak who hatched on 5-01

Squeak is quite the adventurous little chick and has already launched him/herself from the nest and is now hanging out in the bottom of the cage. Luckily we have a very large birdhouse with plenty of room for all the new family members!
Here is a very bad picture of the beautiful cabinet that my husband built to house our little feathered family members.

Meet Rhino

We gave the boys $50 for their birthday this year. Between listening to them complain that we never get them what they really want, and our desire to teach them that money doesn't really go as far as they think it does... it seemed like a great time to do it.

So PF chose to spend his money on a hamster. We drove to Bountiful to our favorite pet store and not only did he chose this adorable little critter, he also made sure his new dependant had everything he could possibly need to lead a happy life. I feel like he was very responsible and really thought it through, he bought food, water bottle, treats, toys, mineral wheel, bedding and wood shavings.


He set up a little table next to his bed where Rhino would live, which lasted all of about ten minutes past bedtime when he realized that..."Mom, he is WAY too noisy, I can't sleep!" and I had to agree, we tried to say "Well, we told you that before you bought him, and now it's something you will have to live with." Which lasted up until ten minutes past MY bedtime when I realized that this little rodent running rampant on a pink spinning wheel was really loud in my bedroom across the hall as well.


Now Rhino has taken up temporary residence on the plant stand in the dining room until it's warm enough to move him downstairs to the family room.

PS Yes, the cage is pink, it's PF's favorite color, what can I say.

PPS he's pretty darn cute dontcha think?

Meet Slurpee

This is Slurpee, he's the newest member of the family. K got to name him.




We were all feeling a little down in the dumps after Charlotte's demise and missed having a little critter to watch and enjoy. We all agreed that the next little pet would not be a spider, just a little too skeevy for us. We discussed getting a frog, because frogs are fairly low maintenance and we found a habitat on clearance at Wal-Mart a month or so ago.



Today we went to the pet store for fish food and they had fire bellied toads on sale for $2.99 so B and I decided it would be our Valentine gift for the boys (He is red underneath you know.

I encouraged the man at the pet store to let the boys know that fire bellied toads release a toxin that is a strong irritant to the skin and eyes, because I didn't want the boys trying to reach in and mess with the frog. He didn't get it though, because when PF asked if he could hold him, he said "Oh yeah, you can hold them and play with them, just wash your hands REALLY well afterward" *Sigh* definitely immune to the look of death which this mother was shooting at him.

Hmmmm maybe Slurpee is a girl, she DOES have lovely red fingernails and toenails *Wink*

A wedding and 400 funerals

So, yeah, we're all about learning at this house (Well, sometimes anyway) and when the boys found an enormous black widow in our garage this summer, they asked if they could keep her.

I agreed that we could keep her for a day or two so they could watch her, and then she was going away. Most spiders get relocated outdoors around here, and Black Widows usually get taken up the canyon somewhere.

Anyway, she just kinda stuck around, and eventually we even bought her a spacious little bug habitat so she wouldn't feel cramped. We have had her for about four months now and we are silly, running to to the pet store every two weeks for a cricket for her, so she's not hungry. (We are also all about spidertarianism...think humanitarianism) Don't want the poor lass going hungry now do we?

Anyway, my dad, comforting gent that he is dropped a little hint that he had heard somewhere that Black Widows can spontaneously reproduce. I looked it up and it's completely untrue, but I stopped looking as soon as I found that and figured we were safe.

NOT! Did some more research today and found that Black Widows, once they have mated, can wait up to a year to lay their eggs, because being able to wait for a steady food source is important to the survival of their young.

Unfortunately the food supply around here was a little TOO steady.

Yep, you guessed it.

Unfortunately poor Charlotte went on to her great reward roughly 30 minutes ago, followed immediately thereafter by 250 or so of her closest relatives!

The boys are disappointed that we couldn't take her up the canyon like we had planned, but...her home had air vents, I just couldn't take a chance with a poisonous spider infestation.

And ever since I spied the little darlings I have had the sensation of something creeping up my arm, or down my leg, or through my hair....

Down came the rain and...

We have a new pet, her name is Charlotte. Any guesses as to her species?

I will give you some hints
1- She is black and shiney
2- She has beautiful scarlet markings

Yeah, I know. She skeeves me out more than a little, but I have to admit, I am strangely fascinated. And it seems so appropriate that it's nearly Halloween.

The boys found her in the garage, she was building a big messy web under the wooden steps going into the house. She is also quite large and apparently very deadly.

We found one of those huge wolf spiders at my mom's house and put it in the jar with Charlotte, she wrapped him up lickity split, it surprised me a little that she could take down a big hairy beast more than twice her size without batting a little spidey eyelash. She then proceeded to suck on him for two solid days! It was astounding. Sorry, I don't have any pictures of Charlotte to share with you =0(

Wanna hear the really weird part? She isn't even our first Arachnid pet.

Shanae and I had a black widow pet when we were little, her name was Sheila. My uncle Corey found it in his house and captured it. We brought it home and fed her for several months then took her up into the canyon and let her go in the fall.

This is the third arachnid pet for my boys. We have had one previous black widow named Sheila the 2nd, and we had a beautiful orange cat face spider last year named Lilly. They are all very entertaining to watch.



This is Lilly, she is like the Angelina Jolie of the arachnid world don't you think?



She even has a tuff side like Angelina, here she is saying "Dude, you are makin' me mad and I am gonna eat you any second now if you don't BACK OFF!"

Our favorite memory was feeding Shelia the second an earwig. Oh the battle that ensued, it was like watching Godzilla vs King Kong...all of Tokyo was destroyed. It was a vicious struggle and it was a little iffy there for a while wondering which scary beast was going to win the day. I sat there in horror thinking "Oh no! My children are going to witness the destruction of their own pet! But alas Sheila won and we decided that in the future we would have to be desperate before we fed her any more earwigs.

We also made a mistake with poor Lilly. We have these large black beetles around our house and I thought "Oh, that will fill her up" so we caught one and put it in there with her. I was DOWN STAIRS, a whole floor away and heard this weird ticking sound, went upstairs to investigate and it was poor Lilly, she was banging on the lid of her jar with her little legs begging to be let out because the beetle had squirted some foul smelling juice at her. Oh my gosh, it was a horrendous smell! We had to give poor Lilly a whole new jar! We never repeated that mistake either.

So anyway... I don't know why I felt the need to share all of this. Probably a distraction from all the crap going on in my life right now. Because you know...when it rains, it pours and while it's not raining in the literal sense, it's raining in my basement, something to do with our dishwasher, we had waterfalls in our basement tonight, of course not until after B had left home for his graveyard shift *sigh* and of course right over my sewing table. I hope nothing is ruined, there was water everywhere. And that is just one of the lovely events not just in my day, but in this hole bad week I'm having.

Hopefully tomorrow will be a better day.

And just so you don't think we are totally crazy, we also have softer, fuzzier, cuter pets =0) But watch out, if you snuggle with them you get the "Chicken pox"