As the new millennium begins, hubby Ken and I have made a few resolutions to ease our future lives with our birds. Perhaps some of them will be of use to you, too. So here goes.
- Take out two subscriptions to the Sunday New York Times, to ensure that there is sufficient paper in the house to change our birds’ cage bottoms.
- Spend at least one half as much time, money and effort in choosing and preparing our food as we do for our parrots.
- Teach Ashley, our male umbrella cockatoo, to say ‘Ashley is a good boy’ instead of ‘Ashley is a girl’. This may require convincing him that he is a boy.
- Join Bird Toys Anonymous to start a 12 step program to deal with our addiction to buying tons and tons of expensive bird toys.
- Add some videos to our video tape collection which are about something besides birds.
- Buy stock in some cleaning products, furniture maker and clothing manufacturing companies to share in the profits which these companies are making from bird owners.
- Enroll in a ‘tough love program’ to increase our resistence to giving in to our birds each time they start sweetly begging us to come out.
- Find the impossible – someone we will trust to take care of our birds for a few days so that we can finally take a short vacation together. (Sane enough to do the job and crazy enough to do the work!)
- Limit the things we impulsively buy for our sweet little monsters and stay within an affordable budget.
- Renew our efforts to find clothing that will not show bird poop and buttons that will stand up to birdie beaks.
- Teach all the birds to be quiet when mommy and daddy want to think.
- Find and cultivate a market for bird poop as a fertilizer so we can buy more birds.
- Take more pictures of the parrots to show when other people pull out pictures of their grandchildren.
- Invent and patent a fool proof lock that cockatoos can’t pick.
- Write a book about the 2000 joys of living with a parrot for the year 2000.