My Insane Stability...

Everest and Budu not shown.  Everest has kittens in the oven and is as grumpy as ever.
Budu's a snake and I don't want him anywhere near me.

Perhaps it IS a little much.  3 dogs, however many cats, a snake, and the 4 of us.  It's been called, "the Danforth Farm" and "the Danforth Zoo" and we love it. 

Why this craziness?  With all the transitions we've been through in the last year, why add animal insanity to the list?  

As Children of Change, Transient Ones, MKs, TCK's, Purple Kids, whatever you want to call it, life has been one big move for Sam and I.  An exhilarating adventure for sure, but with lots and lots of moves.  Multiply that by marrying one of your own kind, planning your entire adult lives around getting back overseas and BLAM, you've got the perfect environment conducive for non-pet people.  

But somehow, our parents did it.  My parents let me get a dog.  And a cat.  We took that dog all OVER the place with us.  All of us kids piled in the back of the Nissan Patrol and the dog scrunched under my mom's feet as a faux co-pilot.  My dad would have less wrinkles and gray hair if he had had his way and been dogless.  But those added wrinkles and early gray hairs from Scout are a sure sign of self-sacrificial love for us kids.  And being a mom now, I can tell you how much I would NOT go for a big lab squashed under my feet for a quarterly 10 hour drive to the capital city.  But my mom is my mom, the planet's sweetest servant, what can I say?  

Sam never had a dog or a cat, but let's not even start on his crocodile farm, pet python, bush baby, owl, rabbits, guinea pigs...

But back to why in the world we choose this insanity, not in tidbits, but in Jolly Giant size.  

Who owns pets?  Stable people.  Stable people with stable lives and stable jobs whose 5 year goals for success make sense and who clock in and out of work to achieve that end.  What do pets actually mean?  Stability.  Or a grasp at it.  I don't know that our lives will EVER make earthly sense as long as we're serious about following God wherever He sends us on this crazy planet, but we do grasp at earthly stability in this transient life.  So we're up to our eyeballs in animals.  What may seem like insanity to someone else is for us a sign of stability, permanence, and a choice to put down roots in this place He has called us to.  As long as God has us here, we're here to stay, folks.  Bring on the zoo.