Mouse Trouble

To back up a little, Soren and her friend Katy wanted a little white feeder mouse for a pet. Katy's mom said absolutely no but we have had one before and it was not bad, so just after Christmas I took them to the pet store and they each picked out a little GIRL mouse to live together at our house. When Soren was 2 we accidentally came home with a boy and a girl and three weeks later we had 14 mice instead of just 2. Soren has another friend, Rachel, who is in Mrs. Lassater's class. Mrs. Lassater was the science teacher last year and when she became a 2nd grade teacher she took the python, Jessica, with her to be the class pet. Jessica eats these little feeder mice. Rachel has two boy mice. Soren and Rachel get this fabulous idea to "mate" their mice and feed the babies to Jessica. Disturbing. Well, the thought of seeing the whole process of baby mice sounded kind of cool, so Rachel's mom and I conceded and we each switched a mouse so that we had a boy and a girl and Rachel had a boy and a girl. Soren and Katy were so funny when we came home with the new boy. They insisted on a wedding ceremony before the two were allowed to live in the same cage. On Easter Sunday I could hear some squeaking so I peeked in the cage (we had it covered because the mom does better with privacy) and we had some babies! They were about the size of a thumbnail and there were 15 of them. We left the cage covered for about 5 days. That same day Rachel calls and informs us that her mouse was also having babies but that she was killing them all by biting off their heads. This is actually quite normal for a first litter and they also did not cover the cage. We had so much fun watching the babies grow.

By the time they were 3 weeks old they were almost as big as the mom. Each day we would have to count and see how many babies were still alive because the mom will eat one if it is weak or sick. The really strange thing is that there is absolutely no remains of the missing baby. 9 of them survived to adulthood. Over the three weeks, not surprisingly, Soren and Katy got way too attached to the babies to think about feeding them to Jessica, but they also knew they could not keep them. They made up fliers and passed them out at school. Do you want a mouse? Check yes or No. Please return to Soren on the playground. They had an overwhelming response and came home to me with all of these yeses. I then asked if any of them had asked their parents. Not one of them got the green light from mom and dad.

Soren and Katy decided the best thing to do was to set them free in the field across the street under a large stone. They kept 3 baby girls and let all of the other mice go, even the mom. The other mom died, sadly, some time after child birth. So then we had three mice and the cage was in the garage, but it was getting quite hot so I suggested that we put in on the table on the back porch. It has been out there for a couple of weeks now. This weekend with the rain and cool temperatures I have had the windows open and was woken up at 5 am by a loud crash from the back porch. I knew immediately that it was the cage. I looked out the window and sure enough it was shattered all over the ground. A cat was messing with it and knocked it off of the table. I was so tired, so I went back to bed thinking the mice were going to be too hard to catch outside and we would just get some more. When Pete and I got up later we went out to clean up and two of the mice were still in their little tube. So we put the cage back together and now we are back to having two little girl mice. It has been an adventure.