The Bragg Barnyard

Seriously. How did this happen? Clearly, it is only the borderline insane that end up with 4 children, 6 guinea pigs, 3 kitties, 1 dog and 1 fish. I am lucid enough to realize this is not normal.

It all began with the dog...and I blame my husband for this. He secretly took the girls to Petland for a year to play with the puppies before the fateful evening. It was March, 2007. My baby was about to turn 2. I have never had a 2 year old before without also having a newborn baby, so I was feeling a little sad that the womb was empty in this odd year, when in 1999, 2001, 2003 and 2005 there was a new precious newborn to love on. My husband pounced on this opportunity.

CJ had been talking about some cute puppy at the store and Hey! Why don't we take a family outing to the pet store to just look at the cute puppies, not to buy one, just to play with them? Lucy was a tiny, precious, caramel colored Cock-a-poo, and Evie, who is a major animal lover (what? the fish didn't satisfy her need for a pet??) was beside herself over the cute puppies.

Against our better judgement, (we have never been known to make well thought out decisions...we are both live in the moment type of people so there is no one to "reality check" the situation when we make rash decisions) we decide to bring the puppy home. This resulted in one of the most precious scenes ever - the pet store employees still remember it to this day: Evie is holding the puppy and we tell her we are going to take it home. She looks bewildered and asks us several times to clarify that she heard and understood us correctly, and then she bursts into sobbing tears, hugging us and thanking us over and over again, and just kept crying and crying. I thought the employee was going to start crying over the scene.

Well, if that reaction didn't just make CJ and I feel like parents of the year!

We closed the deal and took our little caramel bundle of fluff home. It was the beginning of the end.

It was fun for, oh, a few days. I actually enjoyed getting up at 5am the next morning to let her out in the pouring rain and encourage her to "go potty, girl! go potty!", and then felt blissful as she fell asleep on my chest for an hour. It really reminded me of my newborn babies...(remember, we have already established earlier that there is borderline insanity going on at this house.)

Then, you know, she became a completely annoying puppy. We had named her Lucy, but CJ started making up nicknames for her like Lucifer, Idiot, and Dum-Dum. (we are such good role models to our children). She constantly bit at our ankles and hands if we tried to pet her and, after getting her spayed, started doing things like this:

Okay, so it was pretty funny at first. The girls thought she was "hugging" them, so we went with that explanation for a while. But then, you know, it got a little....much....and we started telling the girls to not allow her to do that anymore because Lucy was trying to tell them that she was in charge of them by doing that. sigh.

What can I say about this dog...she will be 2 in January, and I finally see some mellowing happening and think that perhaps there might be hope for her. But we have already determined her circumstances of death...it will most certainly be untimely and due to being hit by a car, as every chance she gets to give us the slip she goes tearing out the door, down the driveway and onto the road, where there is always conveniently a car coming down the road. I cannot tell you how many times I have heard tires screech to a halt, or witnessed a very near miss and had to deal with a very shaken and angry driver. Grrrrr...this dog!


So, back to the story at hand...we get through the rest of 2007 with 1 fish and 1 dog. At the beginning of Jan. 2008 Evie, who continues to have an unusual love and need of caring for animals, asks for a guinea pig. A guinea pig? Gross. But, you know, I love my girl, and she has this need to care for something and so we go look at them. Babies have just been born at the pet store. Wouldn't you know, they are pretty cute. I secretly reserve one, which will be old enough for pickup the day before her birthday on Feb. 1.

She is beyond thrilled and names her new little friend "Minn" to represent Minnesota, because her Minnesota cousin has a guinea pig named "George" to represent Georgia. How clever.

We all fall in love with Minn! Who knew what a great pet a guinea pig would make! Had I known, we wouldn't have had to get Dum-Dum. I highly recommend guinea pigs as pets.

Madeline's birthday is three weeks later and it just makes sense, (right?), to get another pig...a friend for Minn. That's rational, isn't it? So off we go to find the right pig for Madeline and we meet a handsome tan colored boy with red eyes. How interesting and unusual! I think he's the one! Oh, yea, but there is that little detail of Minn being a girl. Yea that. Oh, come on, lets go for it! Could be fun! (remember, people, rash decisions are the name of the game at this house.)

So our little buddy, Apple, arrives on the scene. Get it? Minn. Apple. Minneapolis? We are so clever.

So now we have 1 fish, 1 dog, and 2 guinea pigs.

Well, you can guess what happened after that. Boy meets girl, yada yada yada, (cue music...)

When it became clear to me that Minn was with child, I told the children, hey, I think we should have a marriage ceremony for Apple and Minn, they really seem to like each other! So we did... afterall, I wanted the pigs to set a good example for the girls. A few days after the ceremony I thought it was safe to let the girls know that I thought Minn might be pregnant.

When she became so big she could barely move (guinea pigs are not like hamsters...the baby pigs are born the size of a full grown hamster, full of hair, eyes open and moving around the cage), and we had guessed she was going to have at least 3 pigs, we ran to check whenever we heard a noise from the cage. One Sat. morning at 8am, Evie heard a squeal and jumped out of bed in time to watch 2 babies be born. She then ran down to tell everyone. By the time they got upstairs she'd had a third, and by the time I got home from my errand and ran up there she'd had a fourth. (may I just say, i was highly jealous that this pig spent 60 days gestating and 15 minutes of labor to produce 4 offspring? it took me a bit longer than that...)

Thankfully we had read up on the subject and learned that mama pigs go through another fertile cycle 5 days after giving birth and Minn would get preggers again if we left Apple in the cage, so Apple got a new cage and moved into Madeline's room. (Poor guy, he still seems depressed to this day.)

So now we have 1 fish, 1 dog, and 6 guinea pigs.

The girls named the babies Mini Minn, Silky, Oreo, and Star. We managed to give away 3 of them, but no one wanted the retard, Oreo, so she remains with us. She is such the red-headed stepchild. We just were never able to bond with her like we did with Minn and Apple. Since she is a girl she gets to live with her Mama, Minn, in Evie's room.

We had forced the dog to accept these new family members and it was hilarious to watch her around them...nature vs. nurture at work in her mind...she tried so hard to be gentle and kind while simultaneously salivating and breathing heavy while she would lick their backs and try not to take a big bite! (see Minn snuggled up to Lucy?)

One day, in the spring of this year when we got home from spring break, we discovered that a stray cat had birthed kittens in our back yard. Now there is a big back story here...who knew, but stray, feral cats are very common in the south. Because of the climate, they can easily live and survive outdoors year round. They often set up camp in n'hoods because there are usually some kind souls that will occasionally put out food for them, and there are plenty of trash cans to raid.

We'd had such a cat living around our yard and our surrounding neighbors since we moved to the house in 2005, and this, in fact, was her FOURTH litter of babies that she had delivered in our yard since we'd moved in (the tom cats always seemed to choose our back yard for the rendezvous with the feral cat, we would hear the whole thing go down, it sounded like a baby crying)! Our next door neighbors had taken mercy on the third litter which had 2 survivors (who knows what happened to the other babies, they always just disappeared) and they had found an organization to fix the kitties and give them shots and they were now feeding them regularly and leaving their garage door open for them.

So we get back from spring break and discover 3 beautiful white/gray/siamese looking baby kitties and we say enough is enough! That poor mama needs to be shut down! Capturing these skittish baby kitties and then the feral mama would have made for an excellent reality tv show. CJ spent a whole day on this detail. At one point the man was removing boards from our deck and had a perimeter of kids around the thing to be lookouts for the last remaining kitty holdout that took us an extra day to catch.

That would now be 1 fish, 1 dog, 6 pigs (we had not yet gotten rid of the baby pigs when the kitties entered our family), and 3 kitties...this was the crescendo of our insanity.

We get connected to a lady in our n'hood who works for a rescue organization and we get the mama cat sent away for spaying and shots...she is then released back into our n'hood...we didn't mind as long as she couldn't have babies anymore, and she wasn't adoption material, she wouldn't let anyone get near her. We nurtured and worked on the kitties allowing us to first just look at them without spitting and hissing at us, and then to allow us to touch and hold them without them freaking out.

(I just love the dog watching the kitties in this picture)

And here are the girls with Fuzz Bob Buddy Pants, Sassy, and Mr. Crusty.

Okay, so we get the kitties neutered and up to date on their shots and decide that we can only keep two. (I mean we can't keep 3! That would be...crazy!)

(Incidently, around this time, people were really starting to wonder about us, and I had a friend ask me if she found a stray horse walking down the road and she put it in our backyard would we adopt it? I said, uh, yea, probably, what of it?!) :)

It is truly a sad day when we send Sassy off to his new home. We hear he is very happy and has been renamed Batman.

During this whole time, the kitties had been living in our basement storage area. While I was up in MN with the girls this summer, CJ went ballistic with the kitties being in the house after they set off our house alarm while he was at work by tearing out the wires, and ripping holes in our heating and air duct work. They must have gotten bored.

Banished to the outdoors, they were. I was worried that they would not stay in our yard, but they were bonded to us by then and have happily moved in to our screened porch and enjoy wandering, climbing trees and playing chase with each other and the dog.

Oh yea, the dog...we made her like and be gentle to the kitties. Once they were banished to the outdoors, though, she took her indoor status very seriously and will still growl and chase the kitties out of the house if they slip in when the girls leave the door open. (this pic cracks me up! Lucy would get so mad when the kitties were living in the house and they'd try and eat her food...now Lucy goes outside and eats THEIR food!)

So currently, CJ is TOTALLY OVER all the animals. So much so, that I remind him frequently that it was his idea to get the dog and rescue the kitties (I will take the credit (blame?) for the pigs.) The girls bedrooms smell like a barnyard and have pig hay all over their floors around the cages on any given day. The kitties try to sneak in the house frequently, especially now that it is getting colder, and he goes ballistic. The dog is lucky to be alive and treated as well as she is.

And Bubbles the Fish? Yea, he died. Evie is really hoping to get a new one for her birthday.

Current Status: 4 children, 1 dog, 3 guinea pigs, 2 kitties.

It is what it is, people. It is what it is.