The family is together again

Today I gave the mice back to the breeder, my friend, Karen. They are mostly together, and the boys were happy to see their sisters for sure. Jane, their mom, seemed excited to see them as well.

We are very sad. I'm angry, too, because if I hadn't used the wrong bedding, maybe the mice wouldn't have gotten weak enough to get the fungus, etcetera, etcetera. But I did and they did and I can't go back.

I'm not sorry we've had this experience (although I AM sorry that my little girl is covered in 30 spots right now). I loved raising the babies. The kids loved raising the babies. I'm sorry that nobody got to love the babies as much as we did. And I'm thankful that they won't be put down or fed to reptiles (thanks again, Karen!). They will live out their natural lives, maybe not playing in dollhouses and climbing up kids' arms, but playing with each other and making more babies (to feed to reptiles, but whatever, I'm not thinking about that).

I've also learned some things about mice that aren't so nice. For one, they smell. Now, I knew this going in, but I was not prepared for the degree of smell. Within a few hours of cleaning their cages, I could smell them again (unless I was using the pine bedding, which did a fantastic job of controlling smell and poisoning them at the same time). That's a lot of smell.

They also developed a strong degree of "flight instinct," even when handled daily since birth. Once they grew up a bit, they preferred to at least momentarily attempt to evade capture, even though they happily explored us and their environment when out. That was disappointing.

Finally, the fact that they pooped pretty much continuously was also a bit of a negative. If you played with one, you got pooped on. Guaranteed. Thankfully, I'm not too wussy (and neither are my kids), so we learned to deal.

Because of the list of negatives, we probably won't have mice again. However, we did really, really enjoy having a small animal around, so I think we'll get something else. My research points to gerbils as a good choice (diurnal, don't pee much, friendlier than hamsters, supposed lack of smell).

Now, someone recently said that, if we decided to raise gerbils the same way we raised the mice, that someone would be down for taking some of the babies. I've read that gerbils have 3-6 pups in a litter, so if we could guarantee that the pups would be spoken for prior to the breeding.....

I'm not closing down this blog, just in case. :)

Thanks for reading.

Bye, guys! We'll come visit soon!