The White Rabbit.

I have commandeered a rabbit! She was in the smallest cage ever (approx. two hands wide - and I have small hands) so I rescued her and set her free in my room. She was not too keen on the idea of getting out of her cage at first so I said some encouraging words, namely 'some bunnies are born free, some bunnies achieve freedom and other bunnies have freedom thrust upon them' she was unimpressed so i coaxed her out with cabbage and then she tried to eat my toe nail.

She is about half the size of my foot (I'm a size 5) she is the cutest pet I've ever owned but also possibly the most mentally handicapped - if any of you have meet Zac the cat or Barney the dog you will know this is no mean feat! She shits every where which I was warned about and according to the internet if she gets diarrhea she could die!

I'm in over my head. I don't know how to look after a living thing. All of my plants have died! I don't have any resources. No reasonable sized cage, no bedding, no restricted space for her to play in, no cardboard box with holes in. The internet advice people seem to be assuming quite a lot. I have given her a strawberry for roughage.

At the moment she has a variety of names. I elicited the help of Miss Annie Herbert in the naming of my rabbit and we currently have Captain Sam Bartholomew Ziger Zaper, Esq. However I feel we may have to drop the Bartholomew part as it is too gender specific. The issue being that although I have looked I'm not entirely sure if she is a girl. I can't find a penis but rabbits have a lot of hair.

Plus I remember when I was younger and we got a cat who also had many names. I wanted him to be a girl and my mum looked and said it was too early to tell (maybe this is the same with the rabbit, or maybe she lied) so I named him Rose. For reasons I have long since forgotten I wanted to be called Rose when I was 5. I even insisted my teacher Mrs Cooper call me Rose but she refused on the grounds that my name was Holly but when I refused to answer to Holly we compromised and I was Rose for the day. So my cat Rose turned out to be a boy (apparently all entirely ginger cats are boys, and all white cats are deaf also a liter of cats have multiple fathers - I can't tell you if any of the facts in this paragraph are correct or if they were all made up by my parents). After discovering the maleness of our cat we called him Tiger Rose (slightly more masculine) however it didn't stick as we had been calling him Kitten whilst the sex was confirmed and this seemed like the most appropriate name. Obviously it quickly became completely inappropriate as Kitten reach adulthood but it was far too late by then.

The point of my story being that gender non-specific names can solve a multitude of issues in later life but everyone gets old.

Beware the baby...he bites!

Well my cousin Niu Niu pretty much tries to eat everything which I believe is standard baby practice. He's particularly keen on anything you've told him not to eat. He also suffers from a terrible case of food envy. Unfortunately for me he only seems to get jealous of the food I'm eating. Not a meal time goes by I'm not offered something new to try and seconds after I've skillfully scoped it up with my chopsticks I hear the pita pata of Niu Niu's teeny tiny feet and he grabs my jumper from behind bites my lower back and tries to pull my jumper off until I offer him my food. He's very cute though so as of yet I've been unable to mind.

 

Niu Niu hasn't exactly got the hang of giving you a kiss on the check, he just kind of dives in and deposits slobber all over you. And for some reason even this is cute. He also likes to play with the dust pan and brush. He sweeps some dust one way and then back the other way and then attempts to pummel the dust to death by repetitively hitting it with the dust pan.  Every time he does this it reminds me of times when I've been with Charley and one of the cats has done something human-like, like sit at the table while we're eating and Charley says "Ah, he wants to be people". Except I have to keep reminding myself that Niu Niu actually is a person. For some reason when I first arrived I kept getting a huge urge to make that tutting sound you make to attract a cat when ever I needed Niu Niu to come towards me. It doesn't work though. He just kind of tuts back at you. 

Part of the reason I'm here is to help Niu Niu grow up bilingual and I'm proud to say he has learned his first English word (sort of) he can say bird (he say birb). He has also learned to say no, no, no, no, no which is what I say every time he does anything he shouldn't (very regularly). He has now taken to saying no, no, no, no, no, no just before he throws which ever expensive glass object he's managed to grab as you carry him up the stairs on the floor. So basically saying no five times is not a successful deterrent for babies.

I appear to be bad at discipline. Not only does the baby not listen to me but the dog is the same. If anyone else goes outside and they sort of shoo him out the way he just moves but if I go out he bites my leg. It's very playful but a little obstructive. Whenever the dog is like this Niu Niu gets worried and I have to pick him up. The other day I'm heading outside and the baby decides he's coming too, the dog is ready in waiting. I pick the baby up and head out the door and the dog immediately bites my leg, I pull away but he keeps hold of my trousers. I sort of dance around in a circle with the baby and the dog and for reasons unknown to me Niu Niu picked this exact moment to bite me in the face!

I think my lack of discipline skills might come from my parents discipline techniques. Which basically consited of them assuming that if we did something stupid - such as jumping off a 3 meter high shed - we'd learn our lesson from that when for example we sprained our ankle. Fortunately this didn't happen to me as I decided to jump second.

I have named the dog Mao Mao as this is what Niu Niu kept calling him when we first got him. Initially I thought mao meant cat so I was a bit confused when no one seemed to be correcting Niu Niu about this. But it turns out mao also means fur. So basically it's a terrible name but I'm sticking with it. Presides a lot of Chinese names don't translate that well. Niu Niu means cow cow.