We had pet rabbits when I was a kid. They lived in a backyard hutch, and they really weren’t good pets, but I, at seven years old, knew exactly what would improve our situation: baby bunnies. So I did what any intelligent child raised in a religious household would do and I started praying for baby bunnies every night. I think I did this for at least a year.

I did not realize it would take more than thirty years for this particular prayer to be answered.

We had professional landscaping done this year; both of our yards were completely ripped up and redone, and when the workmen pulled the deck off the back of the house they uncovered a nest of five baby bunnies who were just starting to open their eyes.

Have you ever seen baby bunnies up close? They are the most precious little things. Even more precious than kittens who you know will grow up to become sock murderers.

With workmen and machinery crisscrossing our backyard the babies could not stay where they were. I wrapped the pile of babies in a dish towel, snuggled them up in a mixing bowl, and put them in the downstairs bathroom shower. Perhaps an odd choice, but the downstairs bathroom is dark and quiet, and the cats are unable to get into the shower through the big glass door. They were safe for now, but what next?

I called the local wildlife rehab place and we developed a strategy, Operation Bunny Daycare. It turns out that mother rabbits do not visit their babies during the day; they only come around the nest at night to feed and clean the little ones. So in the evenings we would head outside, dig a hole as near to the original nest site as possible, and carefully place the babies inside. Every morning before the workmen arrived we would go back outside to gather up the babies and their nesting material and bring them into the safety of daycare.

It worked beautifully. Mama Bunny returned every night to feed her little ones. I hung up a sign on the shower door that read “Casey’s Daycare for Exceptional Bunnies.” Our house was ground zero for cuteness.

The cats had no clue what was going on.

Of course, no bunny daycare is without its heartache. One of the babies escaped the outside nest overnight and didn’t survive the cold. We found him the nest morning and I think we all cried. Every night we worried if Mama Bunny would return. I even packed up the babies one day and brought them to the wildlife rehab place for a wellness check, just to make sure they had been fed.

Despite my many warnings to my children that this project was probably going to end in tragedy, it didn’t. About a week into our bunny daycare the babies mysteriously disappeared from the nest, and over the next couple evenings we spotted them outside with Mama Bunny, frolicking in our backyard dirt.

That bunny daycare sign is still hanging in our basement bathroom. And I still love going back to my cameral roll and looking at the pictures of the sweet little babies who were under our care for just a short while. Seven-year-old Casey was not wrong: baby bunnies really did improve my life.

Now I’m praying for kittens. If I get started now, I’ll get kittens around the time I’m seventy.