What This Messed Up Start to the School Year Needed Was a Little Hoppiness
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hoppiness…get it?
The past few weeks around these parts have been rough. Just a couple of months ago, there was hope that this school year would be better than last. Nope. It’s remarkably worse.
In the first three weeks of school, my oldest has been quarantined twice for COVID contacts and all three kids have been sick. In before times, these little illnesses would’ve cost them a day or two of school, but now they wipe out an entire week.
It’s not even Labor Day and I already feel like packing it in. Try again next year! It’s depressing and rage-inducing, but most of all for me, I just want to hide out at home and keep the outside world out of our house.
Except for bunnies. Well, one bunny in particular.
His name is Apollo and he joined our family last weekend. How did this happen? Short answer: I don’t know.
During the past month or so, my nine-year-old waxed nostalgic about the time he held a bunny at a local farm when he was around three years old.
A life-changing moment from 2015
He comes back to this memory every now and then, so I suppose it’s one of those “core memories” we learned about in Pixar’s Inside Out. That farm has since closed and the owner also went from cute farm animals to full MAGA on Facebook, so we were running low on nearby options for holding a bunny and recapturing my son’s glorious youth.
Thus, late one evening after the kids and my wife were in bed, I Googled “hold a bunny near me” and posted a picture of my search bar on Twitter. You know, normal nighttime activities. During my search, I found a few petting zoos and farms that were kind of far away and/or seemed extremely into Jesus, but the real find came in the form of a reply to my joke tweet. An old acquaintance suggested I check out the Bunny Boss, a bunny rescue guy in a town close to me.
I didn’t do much with this tip right away, but a week or so later on a lazy Sunday afternoon in the midst of a second school quarantine, I texted the Bunny Boss and asked if we could come see some bunnies. He said yes if we could be there in the next 45 minutes. No problem. The three kids and I were in the car and out of the driveway within 4 minutes. A new record. Beating our old record by about 17 minutes.
We pulled up outside the Bunny Boss house, I texted him that we had arrived, the garage door opened revealing a jumble of empty small animal cages, and a young-looking man with wild blonde hair and a lip ring stepped out to greet us.
He said, “So, you’re looking for rabbits,” and I was like, “Are we ever!”
He then asked if it was baby dwarf bunnies I was looking for and I confirmed that it was because that’s the type I researched online for about two minutes earlier in the day. Who was the Bunny Boss now?
The original Bunny Boss followed instructions to a T and brought out three baby dwarf bunnies (I suppose, they did look small and like bunnies). My nine-year-old immediately identified the one he wanted. We then picked out an old cage in the garage that came complete with some open bags of bedding and hay and a NEW bag of food and wrapped up the entire encounter in about 7 minutes. One-stop-shop! Seven minutes is the benchmark against which all future bunny adoptions will be compared.
We drove the bunny home slowly because, although he’s young, it’s best that he learns slow and steady wins the race now in case it comes up later in his life.
When we pulled into our garage, we did a dramatic reveal in which we waited for Mommy to get outside so we could fling open the liftgate of the SUV to reveal a…you guessed it…BUNNY!
Mom and kids washed the bunny off in the sink because he was a bit scruffy and dirty (he hated the washing business, apparently) while I went to work on the cage which had a few six- and eight-legged creatures living in it. My seven-year-old joined me as we hosed off the cage parts and scrubbed. After about ten minutes, he wiped his sweaty brow and said, “Taking care of a bunny is a lot of work.”
Great sign.
We held the bunny, watched it explore the house, found out it uses the bathroom quite a lot, and had a great time disrupting our routine and forgetting for a few hours that the school year is a complete mess as is seemingly everything else outside our little safe harbor.
Same boy, different bunny
It was nice.
I guess sometimes you just have to inject a little hoppiness into your life.
P.S. The day after the bunny adoption, my nine-year-old noted that we really needed a second bunny that we could name Artemis. I swiftly replied, “absolutely not,” and played it extremely cool. But, you know, that is a pretty amazing idea when you think about it…
Andrew is a writer of essays and humor and an editor of Frazzled, a parenting humor publication on Medium. You can subscribe to his email list for updates and follow him on Twitter for terrible tweets and more bunny content, probably.