My family's efforts to make our backyard look like a backyard and not a construction site came to a screeching halt last week when Mr. College Bound, shoveling and raking in the corner near the back porch, found a baby bunny lying dangerously near the central air-conditioning unit.

He immediately dropped the garden tools and alerted his sister, who loves animals of all kinds and isn't afraid to handle any of them.  Before I knew it, she had that baby bunny in an old plastic dishpan and was adding some grass and leaves in an effort to make it comfortable.  Within the first ten minutes, that bunny had a habitat and a name.

I, meanwhile, Googled "baby rabbit rescue" and learned that a baby rabbit that small (its eyes weren't even open yet) has only a 1% chance of survival if he's brought into the house.  We decided that the best course of action, since we hadn't found the nest, was to put the baby bunny in a place where we knew other bunnies were living:  at the base of our backyard shed.  The kids found a sheltered spot for the little rabbit and placed him there.

Later that evening, they found the same bunny blindly hopping and crawling his way out of that spot, probably toward his original location.  My kids' friends, who had come over to swim, made a wide circle around the bunny and exhorted him to come over to them, in a strange game of Spin the Bunny ("Pick me!"  "No, hop over HERE!  You like me better!")  Then one of our neighbors found the nest, only two feet from where my son had found the baby rabbit in the first place.  My son put on the garden gloves and carefully replaced the rabbit in his nest.

Now my husband has started bugging me to find out when the bunnies will abandon that nest so he can finish the yard.  "Sure," I replied.  "I'll just go over there and remind them that checkout time is 11 AM."

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