December 11, 2008 by Amy Jo.

Last Friday the kids and I were driving down our neighborhood street on our way to Walmart (to buy supplies for Daddy’s birthday party!) and you’ll never guess what we saw in the middle of the street half a block away from our house…

A chicken!

A real live chicken wandering about.

Our town is small and on the outskirts of the city, but we don’t live next door to a farm.  I don’t know where the chicken came from and we haven’t seen it since.

We’ve had toads and a bunny in our backyard.  A chicken down the block.  A kitten in our garage.  What odd animal might show up next?

Posted in Family & Kids | 1 Comment »

December 11, 2008 by Amy Jo.

We have a visitor that comes into our back yard every night to munch on our grass and nibble on our plants.  We saw him the first time on Tuesday night - a little shadow kept moving by our sliding glass door.  At first I thought it was the neighbors cat!  When my brave husband went to the door to investigate the mysterious movement, he saw that it was a white bunny rabbit!  His immediate reaction was, “Should we wake Carter up?” 

I thought, “Are you crazy?  Never wake a sleeping child!  Especially one with another ear infection!”  But I have to admit that it was tempting…given Carter’s love for his “hop-hop”.

We settled on taking a picture of the bunny to show Carter… 

Later we looked out and the bunny was gone.  I made Jim go on “patrol” the next morning to make sure we didn’t have a dead rabbit in the backyard where the kids could find him.  No bunny carcass was found.  (I know ya’ll may think that it’s not that cold in Arizona, but I was sure that the bunny might freeze to death overnight and then I’d have to explain that to the kids!)

Last night we were doing “family movie night” with the kids.  (We were watching Night at the Museum.)  Jim saw the bunny hop by the sliding glass door, again!  Carter was a little scared of the bunny at first, but Allison loved it!  Of course, we wouldn’t let the kids touch him, but we sat on the floor inside watching through the glass for 20 or 30 minutes!

A couple hours later when Jim and I were getting ready to head up for bed, he opened the sliding glass door to look outside and see if the bunny was still out there… and darned if that rabbit didn’t come sprinting across the yard to try and come inside!

We think he’s somebody’s pet.  He’s not at all scared of people - in fact he hops toward us when we go outside.  He’s really cute and I hope he’s not lost…  But he managed to find his way into our backyard around the same time two nights in a row.  It makes me wonder how long he’s been coming to visit our yard at night?  I am resisting the urge to feed him and make a little shelter for him.  -The last thing we need is a pet!  Two kids are enough responsibility for us right now! 

Posted in Family & Kids | 3 Comments »