Gone away is the bluebird…

by | Dec 29, 2017

…here to stay is the new bird!

We’re still in all-Christmas-music-all-the-time mode. We’ll likely be de-Christmasing this weekend, and the kids have already requested that we listen to Hamilton as soon as we turn off the Christmas music. (don’t worry, it’s a cleaned-up version).

It was hilarious to hear the words to Winter Wonderland today, though.

Gone away is the bluebird…here to stay is the new bird

Because we have a new family member: a white parakeet (budgie) named Scuttle!

I really wanted to get a parakeet when we moved here. The former owners had a parrot who spent his time in the covered back porch. I grew up with parakeets and think their sounds are so happy…and they’re so ridiculously easy to take care of, making them the perfect pet in my book. (number 2 is a dog, but those are the opposite side of how much work they take, so it’s a parakeet or nothing!)

We hadn’t done anything about it because life is always busy. But when we realized we needed a way to celebrate the fact that we’ll officially be SuperHosts on Airbnb starting January 1st, I knew this was the perfect timing!

(Our former house is now an Airbnb property. We’re loving almost everything about being hosts, and apparently people like us too!)

The plan was to get a blue male bird. (males are easier to teach to talk, especially if they don’t have mirrors in their cage to confuse them into thinking their reflection is a friend.) We were going to call him Bruce and teach him “Fish are friends, not food” (parakeets are native to Australia…like the shark…yeah. Nothing like being hit over the head with a joke ;) )

But the two blue budgies at PetSmart were clearly females, and the couple male green ones reminded me too much of Max, the really grumpy, impossible-to-train parakeet I had in college.

So when we saw this pretty white one, who was playing in the cage with his cage-mate, we knew he was perfect!

The kids are in love. They won’t stop talking to him and looking at him and telling me every move he’s making.

Poor bird.

He’ll get comfortable quickly, and then we’ll work on training him so he can get out of his cage. We picked up books from the library and I’m giving the kids some time to learn this on their own.

He didn’t bite me when I moved him from his box into his cage (Max, the bird I mentioned earlier, totally would have), so I take that as a good sign that he’ll be trainable!

(he’s named for the character in Little Mermaid because Scuttle is a white bird who talks a LOT. That’s what we’re hoping for: one who will mimic a lot of sounds!)

Welcome to our little family, Scuttle!