Snoopy Dance

When you're grumpy or it's rainy out or your boss just "shat on your desk," go watch The Snoopy Dance, not to be confused with The Hamster Dance, which is also wildly entertaining. There used to be adorable music with both dances, but they've moved around so much on the Web I guess it got lost in the shuffle.

Okay, to bring this back to bunnies....Oh! Dancing! Amber used to love dancing with me. I'd pick him up and turn on some tunes (usually Sinatra or something romantic and slow) and we'd dance. The first few times, he didn't know what was with all the moving and swaying, but he caught on. Hops has to be in the mood to dance; when he's not, he gets all squirmy and wants down. Pea will fall asleep in a good sway; our nightly cuddle sessions sometimes include a Pea nap in Mommy's arms. It's wicked cute when she turns into a big ball of Pea mush (which always happens the second I pick her up) and her nose stops twitching and her eyes get droopy. After a good few minutes, per usual bunny naps on Mommy, the kid suddenly wakes up and gets it in her head that her salad's waiting for her -- which it always is after our nighttime cuddles -- and she needs to either eat it or perish. Thank god she's not a biter -- I had to teach Hops to squirm and not bite when he wanted to get down after a few very ill-placed nibbles (the eyelid nip comes to mind).

Alas, I diverge. I was going to talk about how cute binkies are, the bunny's form of dancing (calves and fawns also do this in fields, but stop when they grow up; bunnies never stop binkying, as long as they're healthy). But if you're a bunny person, you know that the greatest compliment a bunny can give you is a binky. Pure happiness and freedom and safety and contentment. Ariel got her name (from arial, actually) because inside an hour after I brought her home, she was binkying. This from a girl who was left (with her twin, Kayla) in the dead of winter in a cardboard box next to a dumpster in Jamaica Plain a few short months before I met them. So, the compliment counted exponentially that day (May 12, 2001). I think they knew they were home.

(If you're not a bunny person, a binky is the action a bunny performs when it runs at full tilt and then suddenly springs up in the air and kicks its feet out and twists its body around. A good binky can confuse a bunny who lands in the opposite direction she was running, which is even funnier to watch.)