BOKKIE HAS 4 EGGS IN THE SOUP DISH!!!

It is that time of the year again! The parrot above is not our Bokkie. Bokkie (who has featured in this space before under pets) our bokkie - I need you to use your imagination here, is bright yellow, has a very long tail, a ring around her neck and her beak is, apart from being extremely sharp, bright yellow, and her claws are the longest I have ever seen. We cut her nails twice a year.

She dominates our little flat and thinks we are hers to command. Unfortunately we have made a rod for our own backs and she does command us!

Once a year she lays 4 perfect little white eggs. It takes her a week to finish this exercise. Before the first one is laid, there are signs, and we know that we are in for a month of trying to protect our wooden furniture as, for some reason - anything wooden must be chewed to shreds. So everything is covered or taped down. However, there is none as stubborn as a parrot who is on a mission and I am left to repair some handles of an old chest of drawers I have!

She also chews her calcium block often, particularly at night. I think she does this to keep us awake, not only to harden the shells of her perfect eggs!

The last egg was laid last night - and now that they are all laid for the season, she will sit on them, not, we have noticed, before then. She has a special soup bowl, burgundy in colour and just the right shape that we use every year, and for one month we have relative peace as she tends these eggs and lovingly enfolds them with her wings. After a month, because they have not been fertilized, her instinct is to give up on them and one by one she puts them into her food bowl for us to throw away.

Last year she only nursed 3 eggs because she was sitting on the curtain rail when she laid the first of her 4 eggs and it came to a messy and untimely end on the tray of her stand, she has no cage, and probably no clue of gravity!

I have been encouraged to let a man into her life so that she will have the opportunity of caring for young and not only eggs. There are a number of reasons I have not done this. It would mean parting with her, something she is not used to, or bringing in a male which she may not like, into her space. There is also the problem that I have no idea as to the mating habits of parrots or when she would need to be with her man.

The noise would probably be unbearable as she herself can be heard throughout our complex which is vast. So I still have not come to any decision on that one but am leaning towards just leaving things as they are and letting her have the pleasure of coddling her eggs for a month and be done with it. No decision was made this year.

However, I will buy a book on the mating habits of parrots and see if it is even possible that she would accept a man as her life is so cushy. She may not want all the complications a man would bring into her life after all!

If anyone has any comments on my dilemma, I would be pleased to hear them.

As for Crunchie the tortouise, "He links my worlds" has once again gone into hibernation and I have not seen him for a month. I will let you know around October when he comes out from his "place" to rejoin the world of the animal kingdom!

May you all enjoy your pets as much as we do!

DRAGONS, TEARS AND GENTLE HEARTS

"That is so sad," wept the small boy as tears ran down his cheeks, "sing it again."

So for the 3rd time that hour and almost every day for the past month, I picked up my guitar and launched into my rendition of "puff the magic dragon" - knowing it would bring distress once again to the small boy who was my son. But there was never any talking him out of it, he was adamant.

It was the last verse that did it. Tearfully my child told me how SAD (with great emphasis) that the little boy had grown up and the dragon had lost his best friend, as he did not need the little boy any more in his dreams. How the dragon must have missed his friend.

My small son had learned of loss, and he had learned to feel someone else's pain.

I knew then with my mothers heart that he would have his heart broken many times in his lifetime, and I would not be able to protect him against it. He was on his own. And he grew into a sensitive young man who asked for little but hurt much.

And I watched as the years went by as his gentle heart often bled for others, and for animals who were mistreated and, even insects that were stomped on. My eldest daughter, Shirley, invented "pet heaven" and to lessen the pain, that is where all our pets went. That helped. It even helped me sometimes with our make believe "pet heaven"!

I thought back to a story I told entitled "It's in the eyes" - where I observed that the eyes were truly the windows to the soul, and when looking into the eyes of pictures of my 4 children, I could see there the people they would become. And they became those people.

Now I remember personalities of little children before they learned to bluff, but were natural and knew to be no other way but themselves. I realised that in my humaness God was giving me a head start!

I knew who my children were going to be from their earliest days.

I just needed to pay attention.