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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