And now for the bad news.
I went into Matthew’s room yesterday afternoon with him so that we could clean out the mouse cage. When I looked into it, I realized that two of the mice were awfully still…and kind of stiff.
You know what that means.
We told Matthew what happened and retrieved the girls from next door, and broke the news to them. I don’t have a clue how these two little mice died. Mickey (Gracie’s mouse) looked fine, but Pepe Le Pew (Catherine’s mouse) had uh…a skull injury. How does one mouse inflict a skull injury on another mouse? Matthew’s mouse, Oreo, who is the smallest, was just fine, merrily scampering around the cage. I don’t want to point fingers, but it looks like there was some sort of mouse brawl and he was the victor. I got a small box and Jim put Mickey Mouse and Pepe Le Pew into it, and we had a small burial service in the back yard.
Catherine was upset, but she toughed it out. Matthew was crying, but he was feeling better soon enough, since his mouse is fine and well. Grace however…she was a wreck, even when I tucked her into bed last night. I noticed a big blank spot on the shelf above her bed and asked her what happened to the things that had been there. Turns out it was a Mickey Mouse and a Disney mouse hat, and she told me, “I put them under my bed because they reminded me of Mickey. WAH!”
We will be a one mouse family from now on. I hate the thought of having Oreo the mouse as an only child, since mice are social, but since we seem to a have a mouse serial killer, he will remain the only mouse in this house.
And if the kids were this upset over $2 mice that we had for a month, what’s going to happen when our elderly chocolate lab (currently 11 years old) dies? I don’t even want to think about how upset that will get the kids.
I grew up in a small town near my grandparents, who had a (non-livestock) farm. They had countless animals running around at any time. In general, they usually had 4-6 dogs and 7-10 cats. Given that type of animal population, I learned early on what death was, and I accepted it with some level of grace (it has never been nor never will be easy to have a pet die).
My wife, however, has never been around when a pet has died. We’ve got two cats (10 and 8 years old) and a dog (5 years old) and I know she’s going to be an absolute wreck when any of them die. If our indoor cats live to the average age, our son will be roughly 8-10 before any of our pets die. That may be an appropriate age to explain death, but I can say that I’m already not looking forward to it…
Awww, poor Caldwell younguns… we JUST got a hamster, I’m waiting for it..I know it is coming…my boys are young yet. Jacob is in absolute LOVE with this thing, and does not understand that it cannot do everything he does.
I blame Fab. I saw him making molds out of them for an upcoming episode of sculpey mouse WWF.