Thripple & Hope

Ok, so remember the long nights post?? Well there was more to that story than I actually wrote about. You see there were several OTHER nights that week that Kent and I were up in the middle of the night with Lady.
Lady is a VERY protective dog, and ANYTHING that comes near our compound receives a stout bark as a warning not to come any closer. So for several days in a row, she had been warning something, but we weren't sure of what. and the mystery "what" was extremely persistent and apparently deaf, because it didn't listen to ANY of Lady's warnings, so she kept having to repeat herself..... over and over and over.

Finally after 4 or 5 nights of constant barking we discovered what was disobeying her orders. A Hedge Hog!
Every night, Kent would get up ( just in case) and check to see if he could catch the intruder. Then one night we found it! A hedgehog. We saw it, but while Kent went in to get the gloves, and a stick, it disappeared. We poked around, but we couldn't find it again. Kent decided to go back to bed, and he let Lady out of the house, on his way in.

It took her no time at all to relocate the nightly invader. So there I was, in the yard, in my pj's, in the middle of the night, with a flash light, trying to whisper loud enough for Kent to hear me, but not wake up the girls or our neighbors.

Poor Kent got BACK out of bed and came outside. Now Kent is not a middle of the night kinda of person, he had never been good at waking up when there is something going on, and this night was no different. Actually, it was probably worse, compounded by the fact that the week had already had a few sleepless nights.
So in his sleep depraved state he killed it. Yes, he killed it.

Now my girls love hedge hogs and they have friends here in Uganda that have hedge hogs as pets. so they were devastated when Kent told them that he had killed it. They made him promise that if Lady found another one, the could keep it as a pet.

It wasn't a week later that we discovered a momma and her baby, and true to our love of the Mistmantle books they were named after hedge hog characters that are in the book.Thripple is the Mamma, and Hope is the Baby. They are cute little things, however Thripple has gotten out of her box, both nights they have lived with us, and I can hear her trying to get out right now. Hope got stuck in Baby Girls pocket, and we had to cut the pocket in order to get her out.

It has been fun having the new additions to the household. This picture is Thripple curled up in her, "it I can't see you , then you can't see me" position.

This is Hope, who hadn't really been afraid of anything since we discovered her and brought her into the family.