La Rentrée With Piglets And A Perruche

So, it’s la rentrée. The summer holidays, which seemed to stretch endlessly before us at the beginning of July, are over. It’s back to school and back to normal.

Rors and Tobi waiting for the school bus

Ruadhri isn’t massively impressed, not when it means getting on the school bus at 7.30am and not getting home till nearly 6pm (apart from half day Wednesday when he’s back by 2pm). And he’s had a summer of swimming and bike riding and walking and tableting. It’s a bit tough when that comes to the end. But he likes school well enough and enjoyed himself today. He’s come home with the usual pile of paperwork for me to complete. It took an hour to fill them in and print off relevant supporting documentation for a couple of the forms. However, one of them came pré-rempli – pre-filled in – which is a first, and a welcome one at that!

There was some minor rentrée disruption this morning when we set off for the bus and found three piglets pottering around. These guys have been escaping a few times recently. However, Chris has now ramped up the power of the electric fence and suddenly they’re behaving a lot better!

And budgie (perruche) news. Maple Syrup has been spending his days outside this last week. He’s only had a cat sit on his cage the once! Luckily, it’s robust and even though the cage went flying when Treacle jumped off, Maple was kept safe. I’ve replaced his dowelling perches with natural branches as I read that those are better for their feet since they’re more textured and not uniform in diameter. I’ve rearranged his cage furniture a few times to give him maximum flutter space, but every time I do it, he spends the next two days sitting there looking shocked/aggrieved/confused/awestruck. It’s hard to read a budgie’s expression but I think it’s definitely one of the above. After that brooding period, he perks up and cheeps and does acrobatics, but steadfastly ignores all the healthy treats (grapes, bits of banana, melon, apple etc) I give him in favour of his plain seed.

I still have a lot to learn about budgies!