Hello my name is Samantha am I’m a little nuts.  OK with that out of the way I’d like to introduce you to the newest furry member or our family, Tinky Bell the bunny.  Tinky Bell AKA Tinky, Tinky Stinky, Tinky BunnBunn joins the already crowded house that is home to 6 chickens, 4 dogs, 3 cats, 2 adults, 1 preschooler & a baby on the way.  If your wondering no the chickens don’t actually live in our house, we are nuts but not that nuts.

Tinky is a house bunny that we rescued from the Richmond house rabbit society, great organization if your looking for a house bunny check them out.  http://www.rabbit.org/rabbit-center/index.html They have organizations all over, or at least resources to help you find one.

What could possibly make us want to get a house bunny, well here’s the shortened version of how the newest family came to live with us.

B went with me to our local animal shelter to pay for the dog licenses and saw some of the bunnies and told me that a bunny would be a great surprise for her.  My reaction was, ya right!  What I actually said was “that’s a huge surprise”

She responded with “like when I only use the big girl potty”  Side Note: We’ve been working on getting B potty trained for what feels like a year, in reality it’s been 3-4 months and she’s not buying the whole potty thing.

Me, shocked and trying not to jump up and down at the prospect of no more diapers, “yes like when you use the big girl potty, but we need to talk to daddy first”

We finished up at the shelter and got in the car called daddy and he agreed it could be good motivation for using the potty.  Well a week later she was in big girl undies sleeping through the night w/out accidents.  We spent a month looking for the perfect bunny and getting our house ready for bunnies arrival.  We found Dixie Bell and we all fell in love, Berlin thought we were saying Tinky Bell hence the name change, Tinky came home with us on Sept 1st, 2009.

What does this have to do with anything.  Rabbits are great “green” pets.  They are easy to take care of, their poop is great to use in compost piles or in chicken coops.  They can be litter boxed trained and their litter can be made from recycled paper pellets to organic wheatgrass pellets.  We have tried both and find them both to work well.  Rabbits are also social animals, but not as needy as dogs, Tinky will come up and hang out with us while we are reading or watching TV.  She likes to have her ears rubbed, but then finds herself feeling frisky and jumping around.  Yes rabbits chew but we find the wrath of Tinky’s chewing is directed toward B’s books that she leaves on the floor, good reminder to have B keep her books out of Tinky’s way.

Also if you’ve never seen the amazing bunny spazz dance you are really missing out!  Tinky’s first few minutes out of her cage every morning are spent dancing her spazzy dance around the living room!

Here is B and Tinky on Tinky’s first day at home.

B & TInky