Humphrey the Hamster

The World According to Humphrey is M-ito’s newest favorite book. Muddle Earth has been slow going but he laughs when we read it and he loves the line drawings even if it is collecting dust at the moment. And… I’m still not sure Farradawn has been ousted from first place, but Humphrey is in. And I have to tell you, Humphrey is a pretty cool hamster and a very good book. Betty Birney is the author and she’s tops.

Why is big H good for you? Because it is all about values and good ones at that. It has a good sense of humor – always important in this day and age, has very few explosions (rubber bands not included) and many riffs on friendship and human beings as a species. And of course the characters are basically good, even the bad ones. All are human. All this from a book in the 7-12 year old reader  section. There are five books in the series and probably will be more as the fifth just came out this year.

What do I mean by values? Definitions of right and wrong, good and bad, and then in the course of the book, applied to humans and other species (frogs most notably). Yet the book is complex enough in its problems not to simplify or Disney-fie life. What a talent to have in a writer!

And perhaps what I love the most about Humphrey is my son will almost always wait until a night when I can put him to bed to read the next chapter so I can be the reader. I love reading to my son. I love stories and the two go together so well. I especially love when M-ito dives under the cover to hide from what’s going to happen next and says, “Yes!” when I ask him if he wants me to keep reading. Or giggles when the story is funny and burrows a hole deeper into my side. What a joy it is to hear and be a part of the written word being read aloud.

Now… if M-ito will just help me clean the Gerbil’s cages…

Make-and-Mend Sunday

“What do I do when I’m not doing legos?” M-ito asks. He’s lying in bed, trying to keep his eyes open and failing, though giving it his all. Mom-ita is on one side and I’m on the other. We’re talking about our make-and-mend day – our Sunday. With snow outside (and me disappointed not to go sledding) we stayed in all day. M-ito had a bit of a cold so we decided to play it safe and do no-thing. This entailed the following some-things (not particularly in any order):

• Working on the “Death Star” lego model that his pop-pop bought him as the big christmas gift of the year. This is an over 3,000 piece model that is taking up a whole corner of our living room as he rummages through the pieces (and constantly asks us to help him find a piece) and the 200 page instruction manual. We figure it ought to take him a good two weeks to finish.
• Watching Animal Planet.
• Wrestling and jumping on the bed.
• Me reading him four chapters of Far-Flung Adventures: of Fergus Crane by Stewart and Riddell (a great read-to and read-along with book for a 6-year old with spectacular pen and ink drawings on most pages).
• Mom-ita reading him Max’s Words by Banks and Kulikov (a terrific picture book about the power of words and story telling).
• Watching the gerbils as I cleaned their cages (the two mommies fought so they’re now in two separate tanks of two mother-daughter pairs) and as they watched him play with his Star Wars lego characters.
• Watching the second half of Star Wars I: The Phantom Menace (we’d watched the first part earlier in the week).
• Watching the Secrets of the Furious Five (a sequel to Kung Fu Panda that we got as a boxed set over the holidays) two times along with learning how to draw Po, checking our Chinese new years and zodiac animals (M-ito is a horse, Mom-ita a tiger and yours truly… an Ox), watching different styles of kung fu based on the animals in the movie – moves modeled by kids, and finally each of us taking a quiz that determined which style of kung fu was most suited to us (M-ito the serpent, Mom-ita and me the crane). The movie, by the way was short at 45 minutes but really excellent and quite a good surprise. It is Po telling five stories, one about each of the furious five and a lesson each learned in order to become a master (courage, patience, etc…). 
• Taking a shower and had a huge meltdown (M-ito, not me this time).
• Eating breakfast and linner (lunch and dinner combined).
• Playing with his Didj (that’s for another column – ugh).

“What do I do when I’m not doing legos?” he asks again, cocking his head to the side, one eye closing. Mom-ita and I list what we remember of the day.

“Oh yeah,” he says and lays his head down on his pillow, Puffy the Puffin, his new favorite stuffed animal, close by his side.

A Patch of Forest

We’re in the car on our way back from the beach out at Orient Point. The state park at the end of the island is beautiful, kid friendly, and one of our favorite places to go as a family. It’s a three hour trip, usually with a stop on the way for coffee/tea. Then we eat and spend the afternoon on the beach, playing at the three playgrounds, swimming in the calm waters if the water’s warm enough (it’s not … yet) and hiking on a nature trail. What a beautiful day today was too and our first time out to Orient this year. By the time we get to Riverhead, I’m stoked on green tea to keep me awake and the sun is just starting to set.

M-ito pipes in from the back seat. “When all three of us have jobs and we’ve got a lot of money we can buy a patch of forest somewhere and live there. Or maybe two trees, big ones. Or … we could buy a log for the gerbils. They would like that.”

“Do we all have to work?” Mom-ita asks from next to me in the front seat.

“Yes,” M-ito replies. “Unless you don’t want to. Then it’s okay. Dad-dito and I can work.”

I nod and hit the accelerator as we climb up the LIE ramp and face into the setting sun.

George W. Bush

I watched M-ito in kindergarten class today. I brought our gerbils in for show and tell, our four remaining fur-balls, Curly, Blackie, Movie, and Fari. They were a hit, with M-ito answering questions about their “Rodent background” like a pro from Animal Planet. The gerbils and I sat in the back of the room together after their presentation and watched as the other kids brought in and talked about their show and tell with M-ito’s teacher presiding, skillfully prodding with questions, probing with a look here and a nod there until the items (a stuffed animal bunny, a castle from a game, a gameboy, a Mach 5 Speed Racer toy from McDonalds) had been examined from all angles. One item was a new five dollar bill. When the teacher asked the kids what Abraham Lincoln was famous for, M-ito raised his hand.

“He freed the slaves.”

“Good answer, M-ito.”

My son smiled proudly as two others added the Civil War and log cabins to his biography.

The teacher then talked about the Lincoln memorial on the back of the bill and said, “Famous leaders sometimes have statues made of them. Abraham Lincoln’s statue is in Washington D.C. and it looks like this,” she pointed to the back of the five dollar bill. “Who else is a famous leader who has had a statue made of him?”

“George Washington,” a boy said. 

“Thomas Jefferson,” a girl added. 

“George Bush?” a third asked tentatively.

The teacher smiled and hesitated a moment before she shook her head. “I don’t think he’s going to get a statue made of him.” Then she moved on to Martin Luther King. I had to step out of the classroom to stop myself from laughing.

The Saga Continues

We cleaned the cage after getting the okay from Marc Marone’s shop in Rockville center. I only touched one of the babies because we couldn’t get him to go back in the habittrail. It was only for a second.

Three days later M-ito noticed a small black gerbil on the bottom of the cage. It wasn’t moving. It had been missing for two days, last seen having escaped the habittrail second floor apartment nest, the day after I’d cleaned the cage. It wasn’t the one I’d touched but it was missing just the same. One of the Mom’s had tried to grab it and carry it back to the nest. Well, grab it is not exactly the right word. She’d tossed the recalcitrant toddler around the cage like a rubber ball. Neither Mom-ita nor I knew what to do so we watched nature take it’s course. We saw the tiny black creature hanging out in the corner later, licking it’s wounds but still free of the nest. The next day the little one was missing. At least we thought it was missing. There are a jumble of them sleeping together in the nest and some are black also so truthfully I wasn’t sure – just pretty sure with a gut instinct telling me he was gone. He was M-ito’s self proclaimed favorite.

M-ito found it and I took it out, a plastic bag covering my hand. I wrapped it up carefully and sent it down the garbage disposal – where a previous infant gerbil, a number of fish, and one hermit crab have gone before. Mom-ita told M-ito it had died.

“It died?” he asked, surprised and upset.

Mom-ita nodded. My heart sank.

M-ito heaved a big sigh.

I called Marc Marone’s Parrots of the World and got the man himself on the phone. “Well, you’ve gone through the worst of it,” he said.

“That’s a lot of help,” I said. 

A week and a half to go before we bring them in to be sorted and we figure out what to do with the whole bunch (ie: who stays and who go’s back to the store).

And just how are we going to transport them to the store? Oh boy…

Parenting Lessons

There’s a lot we can learn from Gerbils as parents:

• When a toddler goes exploring too far from home simply track her down, pick her up in your mouth, and carry her back to the nest.
• If you take the padding away from an exit tube your children, even with their eyes closed, will sense the drop, turn around and go back to their nest.
• Some children are daredevils and take the drop anyway. These you have to chase down, pick up in your mouth, and carry back home.
• If all else fails simply block the entrance/exit to the nest with your body and don’t let any of your nine children leave.
• Take turns watching the kids so each parent gets a break.
• Sleep together in a family bed – it’s warmer that way but you can wake up with a paw in your face.
• Breastfeed while you sleep.
• Eat a lot of sunflower seeds.

Gerbils, Gerbils, Gerbils

It’s the 11th of April. The Gerbil pups are 11 days old and this morning M-ito and I did a double take as we stared at the Gerbil’s nest, where four surviving, eyes not open yet, puppies sprawled. Two are white, one is spotted white and brown and one is black. Next to them were either five or six – I’m still not sure how many – tiny newborns. 

“Huh?” I said to M-ito.

“Can we keep them?” M-ito said to me.

I shook my head and thought, wait until Mom-ita hears about this. She’d been saying she thought the other Gerbil was pregnant too. I’d been in denial. How can you tell if a Gerbil is pregnant? Does it order in pickles and icecream? Does it go through mood swings? Does it rub its lower back when it gets up from sofa’s? Does it’s belly bulge big and round? Mom-ita just knew.

I called the pet store. I got the same guy on the phone that I talked to last week. 

“You’re the guy who called last week?” he said.

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“How are things going?”

“Well, I have at least five new Gerbil babies.”

“New ones?”

“New ones.”

“In addition to the other ones?”

“That gives me at least nine.”

“Wow.”

“Tell me about it.”

“What happened?”

“What happened? The other one must have been pregnant too.”

“Hold on, I’ll tell Marc (Marc Marone the owner of Parrots of the World).” I can hear him talking to Marc in the background. “Remember that guy we talked to last week that we sold the pregnant Gerbil to?”

“Yeah,” Marc said.

“Well, the other Gerbil was pregnant too and he’s got nine babies now.”

“Really? That almost never happens.”

“Yeah.” They some things to each other and the salesman got back on the phone with me. “Marc says to just bring them all in, in three weeks and we’ll sort them out then. Let the moms take care of them and they’ll be fine.”

“Three more weeks?”

“Yeah.”

Counting them this evening when the mommies were out of the nest I swear there were either seven or eight new ones. They’re so tiny it’s hard to count exactly.

Gerbils Gerbils

We have gerbils. We held off for a full year in getting them, though M-ito has pressed the whole time for the furry friends. We finally got them and M-ito was in mammal heaven. When people ask, what are they, he loves to say, “They’re in the rodent family. They’re rodents.” I try not to think that way. I tell everyone they have furry tails so they look cuter. In any case we got two a Marc Marone’s Parrots of World in Rockville Center – a place recommended to us the same place we went for the various ill fated fish and the hardier hermit crabs. Overall a good choice, we thought.

We got two white gerbils, females, each about 6 weeks old. M-ito named them Movie and Fari. I don’t know why. they both look so alike I can’t tell them apart. M-ito can. We handled them each day. M-ito has been feeding them in the morning. We taught them to climb into a coffee cup – sans the coffee. 

All seemed perfect.

Then nine days later I looked inside their cage and noticed there were four babies nursing next to Fari (Movie?). Hmmm. I called the shop the next day, after Mom-ita and I scoured the web for gerbil handbooks and every scrap of info we could find on breeding. I called the shop the next day and Marc said, “Well, they must have been a little older than I thought,” an interesting understatement because they have to about 10-12 weeks old to have babies – and, he added, “One must have been pregnant when we sold her to you. Sorry about that. Bring the babies back to us in three weeks and we’ll take care of them.”

Okay. IN the mean time M-ito is fascinated by the babies. We’re fascinated too – I have to admit. They’re pretty neat to watch grow day by day. As of today they are just starting to grow fur and we can see their colors changing. their eyes are still closed. But… what are we going to do with six gerbils? Some of which will undoubtedly be boys and and some girls. Gulp.

I asked M-ito what he thought we should do with them.

“Keep ‘em,” he said without missing a beat.

“We can’t keep six gerbils,” I said. “That’s not happening.”

“Okay, Dad-dito. I have an idea. You’re not going to like it, but I have an idea.”

“Tell me about this idea of yours.”

“We’ll it involves twenty-one cages, maybe twenty.”

“You’re right. I’m not gonna like it.”

And so the negotiation begins. I have a feeling we’ll have three gerbils by the time all the back and forth is done. Maybe more… with visits from family near and far.