FOUND!

After a couple of days of waiting for Little Mouse to return on her own with no results, I decided it was time to go looking for her.

How do you find a small mouse in a large house? I didn't know so I Googled it. eHow said to make a trap with a bucket, food and books as stairs. Ideally the hamster smells the food, climbs the "stairs", and falls into the bucket and is trapped. Wow, easy enough. I decided to set one up in the bonus room. This was, after all, the place we found her last time she escaped. As I was finishing some of the details I saw a little fuzzy nose and whiskers poke out from under the *printer. Ah-HA! I made a trail of treats to lead her all the way out in the open and then I grabbed her!

I put her into the bucket (cauldron) and brought her downstairs. I was going to put her back into her cage when I realized how dirty it was. No wonder she made a run for it. While I washed out her cage (no small task) I kept her in the bucket. She had stuffed all the food she could into her cheeks and tried like mad to escape.

She almost succeeded.

She is now locked in her cage with food, water, and bedding. She'll get out again I'm sure but let's hope she waits awhile.

*for those of you wondering why I didn't just move the printer.... this is our printer.
Think small refrigerator.

Mouse Musings

When we got our hamsters we could not come together on what their names should be. When we realized that one was mean and would bite and scratch the other we named them "Mean Mouse" and "Little Mouse".

Mean Mouse died shortly after the naming. We were not that sad, he deserved what he got. Mouse Karma, who knew? (I have always spelled it Kharma, but Wiki says it should be spelled without the h)

Little Mouse was the sweetest little thing, climbing, gnawing, jumping, eating, and escaping.

She is quite a sneaky little hamster. We haven't been able to figure out how, but she can open up multiple pods in her "house" to escape. We have found her in the cabinet under where her house sits, hidden behind an old picture frame. Evan came across her in the bonus room peeking out from under the printer. We didn't even know she was missing and it nearly gave Evan a heart attack. Most recently, one night last week, I was sitting in the iJoy chair hoping a massage would make me sleepy when I saw something move on the floor beside me (in the dark). I jumped up and turned on the light to find our sneaky little hamster doing what looked like the army crawl.

She is gone again. We don't know when she left or where on earth she could be. Well, we have a pretty good idea that she is still in the house BUT we have a rather large house compared to a hamster. We have left her house open in hopes she will return when hungry or thirsty.

Now that we know how good she is at escaping we are clear on what her name should have been...

Hairy Houdini.

We'll keep you posted.