Apr 19, 2010

A MOUSE TALE OR TAIL - YOU DECIDE - 3 OR MORE TUESDAYS

I am joining in with Tam at The Gypsy's Corner for Three or More Tuesday.
Join us for many interesting posts.
 http://www.flickr.com/photos/joost-ijmuiden/4083042118/
While I was visiting over at The Boogie Man Is My Friend her post reminded me of a story from a long time ago.

One of my sons wanted to have some pet mice. I am only afraid of snakes so a couple rodents were not going to bother me at all. I think they are cute. I just told him that they had to both be females. No problem he assured me.

There we were with a little cage, a water bottle, a food dish and some bedding for them. Funny thing about mice. The more you clean their cages the more they pee and smell it up again. Marking their territory I guess.
Apparently my son was not very adept at finding out the sex of mice. Granted the genitals of a mouse must have been pretty small but really son....there is a difference.

So of course the non-male of the two ended up pregnant very quickly. I was pretty annoyed but just like with our kids we had to deal with it. They would be given up to the pet shop for adoption. All 8 of the little jelly bean shaped babies.

I knew we would have to move the daddy mouse out of the cage into his own abode because they will eat the babies. Plus I was pretty sure that he would be back up to his antics with the Missus pretty quickly. A quick call to the pet shop to find out roughly how long we had before she was in a family way again.

I was sooooo delighted to find out that she could be pregnant as little as 4 or 5 hours after she gave birth. She was once again pregnant with her little jelly bean babies this time producing 10 babies.

The race was on. Get the older babies away from the younger babies before they kill them. Keep the brothers and sisters separated before they become pregnant. Keep those older babies away from the daddy mouse before he kills them or impregnates them and someone calls mouse CPS. I think we were up to 4 cages by then.

Finally the first babies were old enough to go to the pet store. Bye, bye. Have a good life (yes I know who they feed them to). A couple weeks later it was time for the next batch to go. I was in the car waiting and my son ran in to get the babies in a box. 
"Did you get them all?" 
"Yup"
"10 of them right"
"Yup" 
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bibliodyssey/2631016936/
Off we go to the pet store with Mommy mouse and Daddy mouse too. No more mice for us. 
Fast forward to the following week when we came in one evening. Why is the cat acting so strangely? Why is the cat trying to get under the chair? Of course one of the jelly bean babies managed to squeeze through the bars of the cage at a very young age and also managed to live undetected in our home with a big old cat for almost a week. He would have come up two flights of stairs. 

The chase was on. We cornered him in one of the bedrooms after taking chase all over the house. I grabbed him finally and he bit me good and hard. I don't let go when I am being bitten...that is another story...so into the cage the somewhat bigger mouse went.

The next day my son let him go into the greenbelt next door to us. Finally free of mice we turn to go into the house when the cat ran by us into the house with the mouse in his mouth. Back up a few sentences here to where we are chasing a mouse through the house...this time we took him to the pet store. At least I think it was a "him" but you know how hard it is to tell what sex a mouse is.


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15 comments:

  1. Omg, that's hilarious! Sounds like something out of I Love Lucy!

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  2. This is the cutest story, Lori. I have to admit, the mice in your picture are sweet. We had non~pet store mice for quite a while in our house until we took drastic measures to rid ourselves of them and I can assure you, we didn't have to make any trips to the pet store. The expert who helped us, er...put an end to our problem pretty much confirmed what you found out, a mouse can give birth at 21 days old. If you see 1 mouse, it usually means you have 50 more. We could hear them running on the floor at night. By keeping a little bit of poison in the garage, we finally ended our problem. But...they were cute. ;-)

    xoxo
    Jane

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  3. You do understand that if these were show mice and you wanted them to breed, that they wouldn't right? Just kidding, cute story! My brother had guinea pigs when we were kids and we always wanted them to have babies. Guess our pet store guy was better at sexing rodents! Kathy

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  4. You are a far more understanding mother than I! One of my friend's daughter had a mouse for a science project. It tipped over a candle and burned the house down!---that was enough warning for me! Cute tale (NOT tail :)

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  5. That is tooo funny. I don't think that I would be that cooperative if there were mice running around my place.

    Our cat used to bring them into the house, to share. Quite the uproar.

    Jen

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  6. That is a funny story. I had a single mouse. Yours multiplying that is a problem. Yikes. So glad the pet store wanted them.

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  7. Hysterical! Lori, that was the funniest story ever. I could just picture you frantically trying to keep it all under control! haha

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  8. Mice. I hope my kids never want any sort of rodent. Or snake!

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  9. What a great story Lori, how you managed to deal with so many jelly bean mice I will never know, I think I'd be way too squeamish.
    ~Maggie~

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  10. Oh Lori, that was hysterical.

    Years ago, Jeff had an large corn snake that got loose in the house. I was ready to move. Not a fan of mice or snakes really.

    big hugs,
    Barb

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  11. OMG Lorri only you can make that story hilarious - frikken hilarious - I really needed this laugh but what an experience!!!!!

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  12. Oh my WORD, Lori, too bad you're afraid of snakes. I think I'd hire one just to keep the population down! lol GREAT story. Ah, the things we do for love (of kids, not MICE)!

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  13. Great Story well tailed I mean told. YOur a good mother.

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  14. What a great story, easy to envision all those baby mice populating your house :) Or should I say Over-populating!

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  15. How incredibly funny. We did hamsters with the kids. Fatter, tail-less mice.

    ReplyDelete

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