Our first pets had names that were not very exciting:
The first rabbits were named ‘Mr and Mrs Rabbit’.
The first sheep were named ‘Mrs Baa One’, ‘Mrs Baa Two’ and ‘Mrs Baa Three’.
Our first budgie arrived when I was about six years old. He was green and my sister named him ‘Kermit’, a more interesting name.
We did not have Kermit for long. On a sunny day his cage was hung in the garden in a tree. The bottom fell out of the cage and he flew away.
After Kermit, we got two female budgies called ‘Pretty Girl Blue’ and ‘Pretty Girl Yellow’. Can you guess what colours they were?
Mum taught Pretty Girl Blue to shake hands. If one of us put our finger in the cage in front of her, and said ‘shake hands’ she would put one claw gently on that finger and let it be moved up and down.
Mum regularly let the budgies out of the cage to fly around the kitchen / dining room. She made little signs to go on the outside doors and drew pictures of budgies on them so anyone coming in knew to be careful to not leave the door open and let a budgie out.
One day our friend Mim visited and the budgies were in their cage and making a lot of noise.
“Why are they noisy?” She asked my sister.
“Oh, they want a fly.” My sister replied.
Mim pointed to a big blow fly that was crawling up the glass of a nearby window.
“Do they like their flies alive or do you kill them first?” She asked.
My sister explained to Mim that the budgies would like to go for a fly around the room, and we did not feed them flies. But first, she had to stop laughing.
Once out, the budgies would not go back inside their cage until they were hungry. It could be hours before they were safely inside and we could shut the cage door and take the signs down.
The budgies didn’t learn to talk, but they did like to tweet. If there was any noise, they would tweet along with it. One of their favourites was Mum’s very loud, old electric mixer. Before we got budgies, it was difficult to talk to each other when the mixer was going. With budgies tweeting and the mixer going, any conversation was impossible.
Pretty Girl Yellow started laying eggs. Mum would collect them and put them in the fridge and show them off to visitors. Mum used them to bake with and the baking tasted just fine.
Pretty Girl Yellow was also a grump with bad social skills. When there was any new food in the cage, she’d shove Pretty Girl Blue out of the way and get to it first.
Pretty Girl Blue was the calmest budgie I have ever known. She just Pretty Girl Yellow be the grumpy budgie and she just cruised along. She outlived Pretty Girl Yellow by years and died at a ripe old age (for a budgie).
Our next Budgie was grey and I got to name her. I was determined to call her something that was not boring, and after a lot of thought I shortlisted two options:
‘Tweetie Pie’
Or
‘Baxter’ (We thought she was a boy in the beginning)
I told Dad my two options and he said “What about ‘Tweetie Pie Baxter Pie’?”
I said “Hmmmmmm.”
Then Dad said “Or you could call him ‘Pie Tweetie Pie Baxter Pie.”
Dad’s suggestion was so un-boring that I decided that it would be the budgie’s name.
I wrote down the budgie’s name on the shallow box that the cage sat in, but I couldn’t spell Tweetie.
So the little (female) budgie ended up being named:
‘Pie Tweedy Pie Baxter Pie’