The hamster story

For a while, my daughter has been asking me for a pet, specifically, for a dog. I have been pushing the idea and trying to work out on another option. So at some point, we converged to the idea of having a hamster. Great! We bought the cage on kijiji. Bought a book about hamsters so she would know how to take care of it. At the end, we asked her what kind of hamster she wanted and she was really specific: a boy hamster, golden with short hair! So i took her to the pet store to find out that in that store they had only girl hamsters. We had to drive another 10km to go to the other store that had only boy hamsters. Ok, fine. We went there and directly to the hamster section. The girl there was friendly and presented us with a card box full of boy hamsters. There was a golden short hair one and my daughter picked him without any hesitation! Put him on a little bowl like cage and she was in heaven! He was moving a lot (off course!) so she decided to call him Mr. Movealot. We bought some food and some soft stuff that he can use to make his nest.
It was a really good week. My daughter was happy and excited to have a pet. She took all her friends at home to show them Mr. Movealot. Sometimes put him on a small ball and took him outside to play with the kids. We noticed that his eye had a small black scab. Since he was under warranty ( hamsters come with 2 weeks warranty!) we took him back to the store and asked if there was need to see the vet. The guy working there told us that all we had to do was to keep the eye moisturized. He was able to take the scab away with some small tools he had. So we took Mr. Movealot back home and made sure we will take care of his eye.
That night, we noticed a weird behaviour. He closed the tubes that connected the bog cage with the smaller cages. Weird! Why would he isolate himself ?
The next day, Mr. Movealot was being very quiet. Didn't come out, didn't play in his wheel and even in the evening, didn't come out of his small little nest. Worried, my husband decided to open the roof of his nest and see what was Mr. Movealot doing there. And to his surprise, he noticed that there was our hamster and .... 10 babies!!
10 baby hamsters!!

He closed the roof quickly. Since he has had hamsters before, he knew that if the mother feels in danger, she will kill the babies thinking that is protecting them. Good thing he knew that, I didn't. I wasn't home at that time, was out for a coffee. He called me and i almost fell from the chair when he told me that we have baby hamsters. I just took the car and drove back home quickly, going through red lights.
My daughter was in shock, completely terrified. She didn't know what to do with this news. She started crying and telling me that our hamster has babies. But mommy, how can a boy make babies? Is our hamster a boy outside and a girl inside? We had to calm her down and explain that apparently it is a mistake but let her think that the hamster is half boy and half girl. At that point we didn't call our hamster Mr. Movealot any more, rather started calling her (not him anymore) just Hamy.
I felt really bad. I started relating myself with that hamster. Imagine the poor thing. Left in a box full of boys for who knows how long. She has been rapped, constantly and had no way to escape. That's why she was so tame! And then she came to us, under the constant torturing of my daughter and her friends, all the shaking, all the banging on her cage..even one day before she gave birth we took her to the store and there was a lot of confusion and stress for her. The scab in her eye was probably a pregnancy issue that required some more attention and care. I felt so bad about that poor mother of 10.
So I called the store and told them what happened. I gave them two options, either they didn't know how to recognize male and female hamsters or this was a miracle and I had to call TV. Off course was not a miracle so we arranged to return the babies and they would take care of them. We read on the book that they needed their mother for the first couple of weeks because she breast fed them. After that they would start grow stronger and be more independent. it takes apparently only 40 days for a hamster to get pregnant again. So we had to keep the babies between 2 and 4 weeks. We decided for 3.
3 weeks to see how they grew from small gross little creature to cute little hamsters. We started naming them Number1, Number2 and so based on the order they started leaving the nest and tried to discover the cage. One of them was brave enough to start climbing a small tube that took Hamy to another cage. We called him the Spiderman. At the end of the third week, our Hammy was trying to stay as far as possible from them. Build a nest for herself in a cage that required some climbing and left the babies alone, fighting with each-other. Anytime they would be close to her, they would go to her breast and try to drink more, just like a kid that doesn't want to leave mom's breast...it's the best soother! She on the other had, was trying to push them away with her feet and arms and her face was almost screaming : Leave me alone!! At that point we understood that hamster motherhood is not the same as the human one. Even when our kids are 30 and living in our basements, we wouldn't kick them and stay away from them like that. It was time to take those babies back to the store.
My daughter was prepared but facing it, was hard. She really wanted to keep Number 1 or Spiderman but we had to be tough and explain that it was not the right thing to do. We could have ended up with babies again!!
And so, we are back again to have one hamster, Hamy, and is not a boy but we still think that there is some boy in her.