Leif & Katzi the Parakeet - Germany, Fall 1977, Age 2

When Leif was very young, not quite two years old when we moved there, and just over two when we left, when we lived in Charlottesville, Virginia. I've already posted a photo of him in the woods there near our townhouse. That was probably where he remembers his first "pets." There was the three-legged turtle that Peter Anthony found in the woods. It spent the winter wandering around our townhouse, eating lettuce. We let it go in the woods in the spring.

We brought home tadpoles from the pond behind our house and raised them until they were frogs, also observing the law of the "jungle" as the bigger ones ate the smaller ones.

We had a ringneck snake named Slithers, and a white mouse named "Mousey."

Of course, none of them could move to Germany with us in the summer of 1977, and after we settled into our quarters in Nurnberg, the boys wanted a pet. In a big pet store in Nurnberg, they settled on a blue parakeet, which they oddly named Katzi, which means "little cat" in German.

Katzi proved to be a very sociable bird and the boys thoroughly enjoyed him. He liked to ride around on Leif's head. Here they are in the fall of 1977 when Leif was two and a half. We had Katzi for nearly three years. When we moved from Germany to Japan, we had to find a new home for him in Germany.

Leif always enjoyed pets. He would love to have had an African Gray parrot, and used to like to go to a furniture store in Aggieville (the student shopping area near Kansas State University in Manhattan) to "visit" the parrot they had in the shop.