Another Mouth to Feed

As an early birthday gift, Sophie got a new pet. We went to the pet store picked out this little guy.
He is a fire bellied toad. We have had him for a few days now and we have enjoyed watching him. We get all excited when we see he is the water having a bath, or if he is sitting up on his rock sunning himself. He is fed crickets so it is funny to hear the box in the cabinet chirp now and again. Sophie is enjoying catching the crickets and putting them in the cage each day. We haven't yet seen him actually snap them up but they disappear so we know he is eating. Today after putting his cricket in, we closed the case and put the box of crickets back in the cabinet. In that short time the cricket was gone. We searched for it throughout the habitat and couldn't find it. He must have been hungry this morning.
So far Sophie is having a great birthday. It is hard to believe it has been 7 years.
She is excited for what the rest of the day holds.

Impromptu Bunny Study

This morning we spent some time out in the yard with the bunny. As soon as Sophie was up this morning she wanted to check on Max (the bunny). I relented and let the kids hold him and we even put him down on the grass to run around a little. I just blocked the gate so he couldn't squeeze under it. And I sat by the opening to the underside of the deck so he wouldn't find his way there either. The kids chased the poor guy around and around. I finally had to put a stop to that. The poor little critter was just scared and his heart was beating so fast. I had them put him back into the cage and then we got out our Handbook of Nature Study to see what it had to say about Rabbits. I knew it would give us some suggestions of things to look at too.

The only section on rabbits was about the cottontail rabbit but I figured it was close enough so we read through it a bit. It told us to look at the lips of the rabbit and see how there are actually two lips split down the middle. The kids took turns feeding it some hay so we could see how it ate and how he used those lips. Since Sophie was born with a cleft lip, I explained that a cleft lip is often or used to be called a hare lip because it was split like the lip of a rabbit or hare. She just sort of giggled and then said "what else does the book say". I am glad she isn't self conscience about her lip. She actually likes it when I bring it up and talk about it with her.

After a little bit of reading up on rabbits the kids were more able to just sit and watch the bunny so we let it out again so we could watch it run. We tried really hard to just watch it so we could see how its back legs actually came forward past the front paws while it bounced across the yard. We also go to watch it sit up on his hind legs and stretch tall to sniff at something. The kids loved this especially if it was their fingers he was sniffing. We also got to observe the bunny groom himself. We notice how he quickly shook his front paws to get the dust off and then lick them. We all giggled when he pulled his ears down to lick a bit of them too.

We were able to see so many of the things described in the handbook. It was a great up close look and study of the rabbit. It has been great to have Max here with us.