Today I'm excited to bring to you a guest post for Tuesday Treasures!
Amy L. Peterson became a stepmother in 1994 after unwittingly falling
for a guy with four greatkids, ages three, five
13 and 15. Unable to find any other
humorous, touching memoirs about step motherhood, Amy wrote From Zero to Four Kids in Thirty Seconds. Filled with 70 tips, it’s a helpful, fun read.
At the same time Amy
was getting used to becoming a stepmother, Amy’s husband, Mark, was bringing
various critters home. Something Furry
Underfoot is Amy's humorous, heart-warming memoir about raising frogs,
iguanas, hedgehogs, ferrets, hamsters, mice, gerbils, guinea pigs, dogs, a
stray cat, a domestic duckling, rabbits, mynah birds and tropical fish. The animal antics in this book will keep you
laughing and the tips will teach you something about pets and pet lovers you
probably didn’t know.
Way back in the day, Amy
was published in numerous magazines. She now does blog postings about nature,
pets and life at www.amylpeterson.com, many of which feature some eye-catching photos. She works for
the state of Michigan and lives with her husband and a variety of fuzzy
animals.
Social media links:
Pets…and
More Pets
I treasure pets because they don’t talk back, they have
simple needs compared to say, a retired husband’s constant need to find and buy
new fishing lures, and they give unconditional love. Take my one-year-old lhasa-bichon dogs named
Winston and Snickers. They greet me
every day from work as if I was the most fun and interesting person on the
planet. They’re fuzzy brothers that look
like they’re made from bags of painted cotton balls. I drove from Michigan to Pennsylvania
to get them because my husband, Mark, didn’t want to be alone during his
retirement and because he wanted the same lhasa-bichon mix as our two previous
dogs—Dusty, the Angel Pup and Little Dipper.
So it’s great, walking in from work to wags and wiggles and lots of fuzz. I take off my coat, sit on the floor and Snickers
jumps in my lap for his rub-down while Winston runs off to get a toy I must
throw an undermined, varying amount of times before the two pups start playing
together.
Free from my fluffy pup attack, I turn my attention
to Purrkins, our middle-aged, formerly stray cat. He exudes the typical attitude of a cat,
coming up for “snugs” whenever he wants, and walking in front of me when he
wants to guide me to his empty food bowl or to the bathroom sink for the
freshest of fresh water. My theory is
that since Mark and I get fresh water out of the tap, our cat should too.
After a work-out, dinner and a walk or more play
time with the pups, I check in on the hamsters.
We have four hamsters now, which is down from the 13 we had a while
back, courtesy of the fact that a female hamster Mark brought home was pregnant
and well, why not keep all eight babies, he asked? The thing about hamsters is that males don’t
like each other and have to be separated, and sometimes females don’t along
with each other, either, so that meant we had a LOT of hamster cages at one
time. Having 4 hamsters is a good
number, and they get spoiled with a wee run in their exercise ball, followed by
“sunflower seeds from heaven,” which is simply feeding them seeds through the
holes in the top of their cages which they reach up for…as if reaching up to
heaven, says Mark.
In the same room as the hamsters are two mynah
birds, one of which is named Buddy, the other BOGO. Mark really only wanted one mynah bird, and one
day a couple years ago I found myself driving an hour and a half to pick the
bird up at Detroit Metro Airport. It had flown in on a flight from Florida in a
small cage with a brown banana and a small container of water. After thrashing around its cage all the way
home, we took the smelly bird to our Hamster-Bird room. It flew around, took a nice, long bath, and in
no time, the bird we named Buddy was adjusted to his new digs. A month or so later, we got a call from the
local post office saying our mynah bird had arrived, a fact that was puzzling
since we hadn’t ordered another bird. We
called the breeder in Florida and learned the second bird was supposed to have gone to Alabama. Since
the new bird had been in a cage and on endless numbers of trucks for 36 hours, the
very thought of it repeating its journey made us offer to buy the bird from the
breeder. Luckily, Buddy and BOGO get
along most of the time.
That’s how things go in Something Furry Underfoot, my humorous, touching memoir about
raising pets my husband always wanted, along with a few others that showed up
unexpectedly. Mark started with frogs
and iguanas which got permanent homes elsewhere, but the next pet—a female
hedgehog—came to stay. She was followed by a male hedgehog we should have named
Houdini because he escaped several times from his cage to father several
unplanned litters of baby hedgehogs.
Ferrets came next and we had four of those before the first puppy,
Dusty, came along. Dusty had so much
energy my husband’s solution was to get another puppy we named Little Dipper. The
two blind guinea pigs came as a pair; the mice, gerbils and hamsters came
singly or in pairs; the rabbits came in a set of five; the domestic duckling by
itself; and the stray kitten was solo, too.
My book covers about 19 years and includes 50 tips about pets and pet
owners, including Tip #31: Fleas
jump more than rabbits and Tip #48:
Even fish can be stressful.
You can
find Something Furry Underfoot at Amazon.com
as a paperback and e-book, and in a variety of e-book formats on Smashwords.com. You can some cute photos and videos of my
pets at www.amylpeterson.com.
Some proceeds of Something Furry Underfoot will
benefit animal rescue organizations.
Wow sounds like a great book for pet lovers young and old alike!
Hope you enjoyed this Tuesday Treasure. Stay tuned for more great treasures to come as well as Thursday Thoughts and Saturday Spotlights!
Until later take care, God Bless and remember.....Love comes in all shapes and sizes and sometimes has fur.
J
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