Marion's Miscellaneous Musings

The city I'm in restricts household pets in this manner: no more than 5 (fish and parakeets are not specifically included on the list), no hooved animals (this is a city, not a farming community) and no noisy animals.

Our household total: about 60.

2 chickens

1 dog

2 cats

1 dinosaur fish

1 parakeet

the rest: snails.

My oldest daughter bought three snails when her plecostomus died, and they laid about 4 egg sacks before 1 of them died. She found out that the sacks are likely to contain 250 eggs. Fortunately only one of them hatched, and we are pretty sure that there are only 50 baby snails.

She also owns the chickens. She got two of them in a 7th grade science project. They ordered eggs and hatched them. Except for the ones they dissected before they hatched. Given that these are a) 7th graders and b) in a Christian school, OF COURSE they gave the teacher a hard time about condoning abortions. One of the chickens was a rooster, which is why I am familiar with city animal codes. So we found a home that would keep the rooster (and not eat it!) and went to find 2 more hens. Last summer it got up to 112 one day and one of the chickens died.

At which point she started agitating for another dog.

Then our Siamese died at the age of 20, and according to her we are short two animals.

My husband finally came to the same conclusion I did (2 kids, short 2 animals) and now we have two kittens, about a year old. Sasha is the grayish kitty, Emyli (don't you love how teenagers like cute spellings?) is the balck and white one.

So now our household is up to the full complement of animals again.