"No! No Kendi!" I yelled as the bird leapt on to the keyboard "No bidding on e-Bay!"

Jeeze. I wouldn't be a bit surprised to come home and find a carton on gourmet parrot food and a delux playstand waiting on the porch. Good thing she hasn't got my credit card number. At least, I don't think she does.

Maybe I'd better check my paypal account. Hmm....

I'd been meaning to trim her wings....

but felt that it was too traumatic. Not for the bird: she gets over things pretty quickly, but for me. I'm terrified getting anywhere near her with even the safety scissors. I'm afraid my hands will suddenly twitch and I'd wind up clipping way too much feather, or cutting down way too far.

There's no use asking The Hub to do it, since he's even more paranoid about hurting her than I am. You'd think he'd be less concerned seeing as how she has totally chomped his finger more than once. Sometimes I think men are into females who treat them badly.

Anyway, this whole totally flighted bird thing has gotten out of hand. I mean we've tried to parrot-proof the house as much as possible, but there are some things that can't be made safe. Light bulbs are going to get hot, and so will the stove if it's on. We make every effort to keep her in the cage if one of us is going to turn the stove on, but all it would take would be one slip up. After all,she's already flown from the swing perch in the kitchen to the back bed room, where she more or less crash landed on the bed, checked out the selection of snacks on top of the refrigerator. (She looked down at me as if to say, "Hey. Do I like rice cakes?") and, when startled by the shadow of a hawk going past the window, she flew right into the glass of the kitchen door. Thump. Perish the thought if it had been open!

But what really made up my mind for me was when she decided to do a couple of laps around the living room, suddenly got tired, and landed on the wood stove. That's no problem now, but in the winter that could have been really, really bad.

The thing is that, smart bird that she is, she knows what the scissors are and she doesn't like them. I've never hurt her trimming her, but they're weird looking, shiny, and everybody tenses up when they come out so that makes them reason enough to be suspicious.

The breakthrough in my technique came whenever I realized she was a lot more calm when she couldn't see them coming (and I was a lot more calm when I told myself I could abort the mission at any time) Thus, tonight I set her down on the bed for an impromptu game of "peek-a-bird" and every time her eyes were covered I moved the scissors just a little closer. Then on the last two times I just covered up her head and held the sheet corner I was using firmly over her head for a second while using my better hand to clip first one wing, and then the other.

This doesn't lead to a real severe trim, which is okay. After all, I'd rather she not wind up on the floor too much. It's not easy to find her under the sofa either, and parrot getting stepped on is more common than parrots falling in the soup pot (though both squished and burned are leading causes of parrot death and injury, according to Bird Talk Magazine)

Having a parrot really IS like having a feathered two year old....that can fly....and isn't going to grow up to be a person with whom one can reason, go to college, get a job and eventually move out. On the other hand, she probably isn't going to get hooked on drugs, become a teenaged parent, wind up in jail or be arrested for drunk driving.

No empty nest syndrome here!