For Christmas last year, we bought our kids the perfect first pets – two (male) bunnies. They are a year old now and we’ve had no trouble with them. They have been cute, cuddly, relatively inexpensive and the kids love them, just as the brochure predicted.
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So imagine my surprise when my nine-year-old son comes running into the house on Sunday afternoon, yelling for me to come outside and check on the bunnies.
He tells me there is a mountain of bunny fluff in their little feeding box – and he swears it looks like a nest and thinks there might be a baby in there.
I calmly reminded him our bunnies are male and boys can’t have babies, and I start panicking that something has made it into the enclosure somehow and attacked them. So I throw on my shoes and follow my son outside to make sure everything is OK.
It turns out our ginger bunny, Marmalade, isn’t a boy bunny after all and has in fact given birth to three tiny, pink, wrinkly baby bunnies. My husband always said Marmalade was a girly name. He had no idea how right he was.
So last weekend, we more than doubled the pet population of our household and I became a … gulp ... foster bunny grandparent for the first time.
This highly unexpected occurrence put us into a bit of a tailspin as we googled newborn bunny care (and desexing bunnies!), contacted the breeder for guidance and reorganised a few things to accommodate vet visits and new purchases to ensure everyone was happy and healthy … and not getting pregnant again before the new babies had even opened their eyes.
This experience got me thinking about disruption and change. I took a moment to ponder the fact that while I relish change in my work-life, I tend to avoid it in my personal life.
New challenges at work mean new opportunities to change it up and develop a new market focus, new ways to deliver old services or to meet the changing needs of my clients. It’s exciting and challenging and gets my blood pumping. After all, this is how I came up with the digital footprint products and the payment plan options for approved and Newstart clients. Helping more people in a meaningful way is thrilling.
For some reason, applying the same principles of innovation, enthusiasm and entrepreneurship to change in my personal life hasn’t been something I’d really considered before.
Seeing challenges that arise on the homefront as a temporary problem awaiting a solution and being willing to apply the principles of innovation and entrepreneurship to resolving the situation is a great way to eliminate the sense of “chore” from the situation and increase the value of flexibility in my own backyard, literally.
It’s interesting how skills developed in the workplace can be applied at home.
Many of us focus on skill development and transferable skills as beneficial in a one-way transaction to the workplace, but often we can benefit from our professional development and training in more ways than one.
So, we have a plan. Our bunny dad, Benji, is being taken to the vet to be desexed, we will help the new bunny parents take care of their little wrinkly bundles of joy until they are old enough to be rehomed and – if we can’t convince my husband to let us keep them – the original breeder is interested in them. And, with our son celebrating his birthday today, he gets baby bunnies for Christmas and his birthday!