RIP

We were faced with a tragedy of sorts today. As many of you know, Nicholas' Gerby who turned out to be a girl had a litter of 8-10 babies on Sunday. We checked on her a few times a day to see how she was doing...and she was trudging along. She was always with her babies unless she was eating or drinking and those babies were ALWAYS nursing. Today we found her not moving and away from the babies. Upon investigation, we discovered that Gerby had passed away. This was distressing for many reasons...but primarily because we still had six surviving babies that we haven't the slightest idea how to care for. Jonathan took the whole cage over to Pet Supplies Plus to find out what happened and what we could do. They speculate that Gerby died from so much demand on her...she just couldn't keep up with it. We asked if there was a surrogate mommy we could put the hamsters with? Nope. Would they take them? Nope. They suggested we could give them to someone who has a snake and they could be a meal for the snake. According to the pet store that would be more humane than allowing the babies to simply starve to death. We didn't stomach that option very well and didn't think that it would go over well with the kids at all. So we tried syringe feeding these tiny naked hamsters every 2-3 hours, trying to keep them warm on a warm pack, and seeing what we can do to try to save them. It is helping distract Nicholas from losing Gerby. Poor little guy! (We didn't have much luck because they were all gone by morning...*SIGH*at least we tried)

Poor Jonathan! This would happen on my weekend to work...therefore, I'm not even at home to help deal with all of this commotion.