The Neighborhood Zoo

Merrill and I are currently house-sitting for a family in the ward for a week while they are visiting family in Arizona for Thanksgiving. And it has been so fun! These people have SO many pets! 1 fish, 2 cats, and 4 dogs. 3 parrots and 2 crazy cockatiels in the living room. They have 8 canaries, 2 parakeets, 2 parrots, and a rat in the kids room. Then there is the garage, full of mice, more rats, more parakeets, and more cockatiels they are breeding. In the backyard they have tons of rabbits and some guinea pigs, and some more parakeets. Luckily we don't have to worry about the backyard animals-they got another person to take care of them. The birds in the living room keep us busy enough. One of the parrots doesn't have clipped wings, and it flies in circles all over the room. Another parrot sounds the alarm when the flying parrot tries to make the third parrot convinces her to escape their perch and run all over the house. One of the cockatiels (Einstein) walks around the room trying over and over again to climb up our legs and perch on our shoulders. The other cockatiel always follows a short time later. We don't like them perching on our shoulders too long-if they get comfortable, they tend to poop on us. But depsite the daily feeding schedule and trying to get all of the different types of food right for each of the different animals, we have had a lot of fun.