When we moved into our house last August, it wasn’t long before we noticed that we had a little furry friend that liked to frequent our “park-like” (as described by the seller’s agent) backyard. It wasn’t Tessa, of course; it was a cute little fuzzy bunny.
We spotted him (her? who knows) every once in a while, hopping along through our grass, near our bushes, under our trees. We saw him less during the winter months, but as the weather grew warmer again, the sightings increased. Then, within the last few days, it started to seem like this bunny was everywhere.
You know that saying, “multiply like rabbits”? Yeah, well… you know what’s coming next, don’t you?
There are multiple bunnies.
 |
| They look a lot like this guy (Credit: Wikipedia) |
I woke up to a beautiful morning today, bright and sunny. I stumbled into the bathroom to get myself into the shower, and I took a few moments to look out over our backyard and admire how well the greenery has all filled in now. Immediately, I spotted our furry friend. And then a second bunny came out of nowhere and started chasing him. I continued getting ready to shower, then took another peek. Now, I saw one bunny hanging in the middle of the yard, and noticed some activity toward the back of the yard–TWO bunnies running around. 1 + 2 = THREE BUNNIES.
I quickly walked downstairs to alert Michael to the bunny baby boom, then went back upstairs to get my butt in the shower. It was getting late now.
But then I took one more look out the window and OH MY GOD THERE WERE FOUR BUNNIES.
We have a bunny infestation, y’all.
I like them as much as I can like a wild furry creature. I mean, out of all types of infestations to have, I’m happy to have bunnies, of all things. But, uh… what do we do?
A few weeks back, we were talking to our next door neighbor and somehow got on the subject of the wild little rabbit we had seen many times before. He actually said to us, “You guys have to be careful about your deck. A few years back, the previous owners had a problem with a bunch of bunnies living under there.” At the time, we were all, “Oh, really?” and kind of brushed it off.
Apparently, bunnies find our deck (and our yard) to be quite a cozy home.
Michael did some research this morning and it seems that there isn’t really an easy way to get rid of them. Some solutions involve moth balls, or predator urine. Which begs the question: where the hell do you buy predator urine? Plus, Tessa would have a BALL rolling around in that. Yum.
We’re leaning toward trying out my mom’s tender heart trap and then driving the bunny wayyyyy down the road to the country and setting him/her free. And then repeating that step into infinity until we somehow capture them all.
Gahhh. Let the adventure begin.
Has anyone ever had their yard overtaken by rabbits? How did you handle it? Any advice?
(Also, did you know that “dag nabbit” derives from “dang rabbit” from the old Bugs Bunny cartoons? You learn something new every day.)
Three years ago, I went on the hunt for a strawberry pancake recipe. I found one, and made it. And sure, it was good–but it wasn’t exactly what I had been looking for. We found that adding strawberry chunks to the batter resulted in extra moisture, which made for a somewhat soggy pancake in the areas in which the strawberries were cooked inside. “Soggy” has a horrible connotation, but it’s just for a lack of a better way to describe it. I promise, they weren’t THAT bad. At any rate, we never loved them enough to think about making them again.
As Michael and I talked about plans for Mother’s Day, I mentioned that I’d like to get up on Sunday and make some pancakes. I hadn’t made any since prior to starting our kitchen renovation, so cooking a wonderful homemade breakfast seemed long overdue.
Then, while grocery shopping on Saturday morning, I noticed that the price of strawberries had come down quite a bit, and the 2 lb. containers were full of bright red, delicious-looking strawberries. On a whim, we snagged a container, and later, it came to me: strawberry pancakes. I needed to make strawberry pancakes.
But I also needed to find a new recipe. I knew right away that I wanted to find something that incorporated strawberry puree instead of strawberry pieces, so I googled accordingly.
And just as I had imagined three years ago, the strawberry puree was the answer. It’s difficult to tell once the pancakes are cooked to be golden brown, but the inside of the pancakes are a pretty shade of light pink. The strawberry flavor is uniformly distributed throughout each pancake to give it subtle fruity undertones. I lightly sprinkled them with powdered sugar and a slight drizzle of maple syrup and… yum.
Nora ate THREE pancakes + a boatload of fresh strawberries on the side, so needless to say, she was a huge fan, too. And she ate them completely plain, so that’s a testament in and of itself. After she had polished off two, I asked her, “Are you all done?” and she vehemently shook her head. I then asked, “Do you want more?” and a huge smile spread across her face and she waved her arms and kicked her legs excitedly. When I brought her third one over to her, she literally raised her arms and made a “cheering” motion. I kid you not. With success like that, we had no choice but to declare these the pancake of choice for summer weekends.
So open those windows for some fresh air, enjoy the cool, crisp mornings, and pick yourself up some strawberries. Warm up a skillet or griddle and start the day off right. You’ll thank me later.
As I often do, I doubled the original recipe to accommodate my pancake-loving girl. She loves leftover pancakes reheated in the toaster! This makes about 16 average-sized pancakes; I use approximately 1/4 cup batter for each pancake.
Strawberry Puree Pancakes
(Source: Adapted from Cin Cin, Let’s Eat!)
Ingredients:
– 2 cups flour
– 4 tbsp of granulated sugar
– 2 tsp baking powder
– 1/8 tsp salt
– 1 cup strawberry puree (made from approximately 2 cups of fresh strawberries)
– 2 eggs
– 1 to 1 & 1/2 cups milk
– 2 tbsp melted butter, more for cooking
Directions:
1. Mix dry ingredients together in a bowl: flour, baking powder, sugar, and salt.
2. Lightly beat the egg in a separate bowl. Add in 1/2 cup of milk, strawberry puree, then melted butter. Mix well.
3. Add the wet ingredients to the dry, whisk to get all the lumps out. Add more milk if the batter is too dry and lumpy. (Note: I only needed the 1 cup of milk. Add more only if you need to thin out your batter.)
4. Heat the griddle or skillet over medium heat, grease with a dab of butter or cooking spray, then cook away. Scoop 1/4 cup of batter for each pancake.
5. Serve with powdered sugar, honey, or a little syrup.
I may still be waiting for that magical word–“Mama,” of course–to cross Nora’s lips, but there are a million and one other reasons to love being her mother.
I had a fantastic Mother’s Day. It started with waking up to another beautiful day, grabbing my smiling girl from her crib, and bounding barefoot down the stairs to make a homemade breakfast in the kitchen. The kitchen that is looking REALLY awesome these days.
That’s right–the cabinet doors are back on, folks. If you follow Heather Drive on Facebook, you got a sneak peek cell phone pic this weekend. If you don’t follow on Facebook (why not? you totally should!), you’ll get to see a few bits of it in these adorable pics of Miss Nora “helping” me make our strawberry pancakes this morning. Little one likes to be all up in the action in the kitchen.
(Hello, glistening white cabinets. But ANYWAY… back to Mother’s Day.) Check Nora out withher measuring cups and her little bear. Gotta love it.
My beautiful girl. A single tear hanging out on her cheek–I don’t even remember what she was losing her cool over, but I think it might’ve involved the delay in breakfast being served. Girlfriend doesn’t like waiting for her food in the morning. Go figure.
After breakfast, Nora went over to the sliding glass door and “asked” (without using words) to go outside, so she and I went on an adventure in the backyard while Michael tackled the dishes (good guy).
The remainder of the morning was pretty normal, a few errands out and about before coming home to put Nora down for a nap.
While she was sleeping, I went to Joann Fabrics with my mom to pick out fabric for the shade I’m going to make for the kitchen window, and once I was home and Nora was up, we went to my in-laws’ for a little while before we ended up at my mom’s with my family for some delicious takeout Chinese food, which we ate out on her deck in the gorgeous weather.
Fun, fun, fun. Seriously a great day.
Then, I did bathtime, which ended the best way bathtime possibly can end:
Yeah, pretty much the greatest thing ever.
And then I realized that aside from the sunglasses photo, we hadn’t gotten any nice “posed” pics in honor of Mother’s Day, so we did them with Nora in her jammies at bedtime.
Precious girl. I feel so blessed to be her mommy.
Happy Mother’s Day to all of the mothers out there. I hope you enjoyed your day as much as I did.
Nora is not much of a performer. She’s naturally shy. And stubborn, so she doesn’t often do things on command. But tonight, she was “on.” She started dancing a little jig to the jazz music on her activity table, and when we demanded “AGAIN!” she actually obliged.
And this was AFTER she insisted on putting on a random headband she found in one of her toy drawers.
But tonight, she was happy to dance, sing, and laugh–over and over and over again. And I got it.
I’ve been working a lot lately. In fact, I was actually at the office until 12:30 a.m. last Thursday night. It was nuts. But this week has been pretty normal, which is a nice break from the crazy.
In between crazy work days, I’ve been busy trying to keep things moving in the right direction with the kitchen. What have I been doing, exactly? Well, I’ve been spending a lot of time in here:
That’s our basement, and that plastic is our makeshift “spray booth” for spray painting our cabinet doors.
Respirator for the paint “dust,” ear plugs for the compressor… sexy.
This whole process has been more exhausting than I thought–it takes me about two hours to do one coat on all of the doors–and that’s just ONE side of the doors. Each side/coat is done separately, so I have done this four times so far. One coat of primer on each side (two nights), then one coat of paint on each side (two nights). I still have one more coat of paint to do on each side before I’m hopeful that they’ll be DONE!
Overall, I’ve been really happy with the results of spraying them. The paint goes on very smoothly, no brush/roller marks, etc. And even though it takes me two hours per coat per side, I have to believe that it’s still faster than doing them by hand!
Things are lookin’ good! I can’t wait to get these bright babies hanging back up in our kitchen!
I’m hoping to do the last two rounds this weekend. We’ll the let the doors “cure” for a few days before hanging them back up, so the goal is to have them hanging by NEXT weekend. And if that happens, you know I’ll be back with photos! Woot woot!
About
I'm Heather. I'm 33 and have been married to Michael for seven years. Together, we have two beautiful little girls we love more than anything, and a miniature dachshund who drives us crazy. I'm a full-time working mom who has very little time for my own "stuff" these days, like home improvement, cooking/baking, cake decorating, and photography. Despite the team not making the playoffs since 1999, I'm STILL a Buffalo Bills fan, which I think speaks to my loyalty AND sense of humor. I can't wait to pick up the pace with travel again some day... you know, when we're done being ruled by tiny fists. Welcome to my blog.
