While bringing up five children, four of them boys, we had just about every pet you could imagine at one time or another. It was always an adventure! It was also a lot of work for me...but hey, I learned how to scream! The most scary for me were the two ball python snakes that were kept in a 55 gallon aquarium and always managed to get out! Sometimes the kids would be playing with them and just leave them on the floor. I once went in to make up my sons bed and as I picked up the pillow, I picked up the snake (inside) the Pillow Case! My family is getting used to my screams. The boys would wrap it around their necks, then sneak up to hug me, producing a fairly loud scream. My daughter came to me once with her hair pulled up on top of her head...and the snake wrapped all through it, coiled up and hissing (I have pictures of this). I'll have to admit though, it was sort of cool to watch them swallow a mouse whole (of course if there were only one mouse, it could even be cooler)!
Have you ever seen a real live hedgehog?? It's a tiny little thing covered in very sharp quills. You can't play with it, hold it or pet it because cuddling is not it's thing! It would roll up into a ball, bristling up, jumping and hissing loudly anytime anything got too near...except for my one of my sons, who could pick him up and carry him around without being hissed at or stuck with those needles. (I, on the other hand, was stuck many times by those things!) I suppose it's a good thing that this was his pet because somebody had to get him out of the cage so the boys could play catch, baseball gloves and all!
Worst of all were the hamsters! A friend gave my son two hamsters for his birthday, both supposedly boys. As it turned out, one was a girl. We figured it out when we awoke one morning to find six little hamster babies in the cage. Hamsters grow fast!!! Within two -four weeks, they are having babies themselves.....and we finally ended up with forty-eight (48) hamsters!!! We gave away a few but for the most part, nobody would take them (not the schools, daycare centers, churches or even the pet stores). Hamsters too were masters at escaping their cages (did you know they can eat right through the plastic ones?) Yes, I was scared of them too, aren't they just like mice? In the end, they made excellent food for the snakes (with the exception of the two original ones, Fred and Ethel)! We didn't have to buy mice for the snakes, the hamsters were steadily disappearing, it was a win win! Well, for everybody except me, because the snakes that I was scared of were now three times the size!
Oh, we had guinea pigs (have you ever heard them scream?) and ferrets (boy, don't they stink?), lizards and turtles, fish, rabbits (they too, like hamsters, can take over in a flash) and, of course, several of the normal household pets, cats and dogs. We do still have a dog and she's easy to spot...just look for a little white dog, with a black head and a smiley face drawn in purple marker on her left side!
But wait! We're not done, we can't stop there! What house can be a home without a pot-bellied pig?? A pig, for crying out loud!! One day, I opened the front door to find my husband, standing there holding a pot-bellied pig that he had found just wandering alongside the highway. Of course I understood that he had to bring it home, there was no other choice. But this one stayed only a week, gone the very day I found sleeping on the top bunk with my son.
Never fear though, for my son, knowing we needed something to replace the pig, came home from a trip out of state, with twelve (yes, 12!) pigeons!! Now do you know anybody else that has a dozen pigeons for pets? I don't either! ! Well, we did for a while, built a big cage outside, but they but they didn't stay long. They never could seem to find their way back home after being tossed into the air with a message taped to one of their feet. "HELP ME", said the message, "GET ME OUT OF THIS ZOO!"
Stacy Owens
