Thursday, April 10, 2008

Gerbils

I don't think I have ever reported on the new little furries we have in our house. Gerbils! Actually, they were Christmas gifts for the kids. We gave them the cage, wheel and a few accessories on Christmas morning and we all went to the pet shop to pick out the gerbils a few days later.

Introducing: Henry and Lucky!They are pretty cute, don't you think? (If you think they look like rats and are smelly and messy, you'd be partially correct, but let's try to have a positive outlook.)

Here is their home when we first got them.Then every time we'd stop by the pet shop, the kids would see this monstrosity and begin drooling.

In fact, Jeff thought it looked pretty cool too. They hatched a plan to get this new habitat for the gerbils as Dad's birthday gift. (They know they should choose gifts for me more carefully.) I tried to warn them. I said I thought it would be super messy because the gerbils would be burrowing and kicking all their bedding out of this cage.

My warnings were ignored. And yet, I was totally correct.

We got that ridiculous amusement park of a cage and the gerbils seemed to like it just fine, but they made a mess tossing the bedding all over the place. And you can't really see them in the cage because all that plastic is tinted (and filled with glitter!). They have a spot right in our tv room and we like to just watch them chew and burrow and run on the wheel. In the new cage, we had to get face to face with them to see what was going on. And you can imagine how hard it was to clean. After only a few days, Jeff took it all apart, cleaned it all up, re-packaged it and returned it. I resisted saying, "I told you so." Ok, maybe I didn't resist.
Since then, we've found a decent compromise.
We call it the loft. It fits on top of the original cage (aquarium) and there are two tubes that hang down into the cage that Henry and Lucky can climb up to the shelves on the top. Super fun. Still a bit of a hassle to clean, though.
I had gerbils when I was a kid. They were called Thomas and Chrissy. They had lots of babies. Henry and Lucky will not be having babies.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I remember when my mother and 3 year old brother came home from a country school fair with two guinea pigs - Nibbles and Patches. They didn't have such luxurious accommodation but managed to produce a squillion offspring just the same. I hope you're sure about Henry & Lucky!

Joanna Stein said...

So many babies. I don't even remember what Mom did with them, that is if Krissy didn't eat them.

I wonder if Mom still has the picture of dad with the gerbil climbing out of his shirt pocket with a rubber band dangling around its neck.

Sue Seibert said...

Since I'm 65, I don't think people thought of rodents as pets, but our girls (your age) and then the grandchildren who lived with us had them. Now, the 21-year-old grandson, college senior, honor student has a chinchilla, and he loves it! I used to have mice, gerbils, guinea pigs in my classroom, and the kids always loved it.

Looks like you guys are doing well.