Our Escaping Pets!

Okay. One would think that I might be talking about one of our two dogs or our cat, but I am talking about Cole's fish and Alex's hamster. First, Cole has this little minnow that we caught down at the neighborhood lake last spring. He has been keeping Fishstick (who my Aunt Betty-Jo claims is a female fish) in a vase on his dresser ever since then. I had no idea that she would live this long. I was changing the water the other day and Fishstick jumped out and slid down the drain of the kitchen sink! Mike quickly started taking apart the pipes under the sink. However, Fishstick was not in the pipe. I used a flashlight to look down the drain from the top, and she was stuck on a little tiny ledge just below the drain in the sink. We ran some water through the drain, and we were able to get her back safely in her vase.

Alex's escaping hamster is another story. Leia has a really cool cage with lots of tubes that disassemble for easy cleaning. But she has figured out how to detach the plastic lid and open the wire door, and she likes to escape nightly. The thing is that she will manage to disassemble her cage, spend the night running around, and then return to her cage by morning with a collection of little "treasures" that she has found. Unfortunately, some of these little "treasures" that she has collected have been the buckles to Alex's L.L. Bean monogrammed book bag (not cheap). My mom suggested that we put her cage in the bathtub so that she would be stuck in a closed in area if she escaped again. So we did that for several nights, but then she made a jump from the cage to the faucet and managed to turn on the water! When Mike went to wake the boys up for school, he found Leia back in top nest of her cage asleep with over an inch of water in the tub and a steady drip of water coming out of the faucet. We finally decided that the hamster was going to have to get a new cage. My mom helped us out by purchasing a new glass cage with a latching lid that does not have all of the tubes and detachable features. Leia is very bored, but we try to get her out every day for a run in her ball.

Our Labor Day Weekend Camping Trip

We spent the weekend camping in the mountains in our pop-up. The campground had a lot of activities for the kids including a water slide, fishing, a jumping pillow, and lots of places to ride bikes. However, the camp sites were extremely close together and the place was crawling with people. When we first arrived, we quickly found that if we opened our camper, it was going to actually touch the camper in the site behind us!! The people in the office were nice enough to let us move over one site. Our closest neighbors for the weekend had 3 boys, so our boys made instant friends. We had planned to go tubing down the river, but it drizzled rain most of the day on Sunday, and it never seemed warm enough to get into the middle of a cold river. Mike and the boys spent most of Sunday trying to catch the huge trout that were stocked in one of the campground lakes. In fact, Mike caught one fish Sunday morning before the rest of us even woke up. Later in the day, there were several groups around the lake who were catching whole stringers full of fish while other groups of fishermen (like my little fishermen) could not even get a bite. Mike even switched over to several different types of bait, but nothing worked. Still, we had a great weekend. Now, we are home, and the camper and car are cleaned out, and we are busy trying play catch-up with getting ready to start the week.