We are animal fans. We like to have a pet. Preferably a kitten or a cat, but when that's not possible we go for a cute hamster... or two, or three. Which is what we did in Korea.
We had one, lonely white hamster named Yuki. One day, I decided that I wanted to get her a friend. E-mart sold hamsters for the equivelant of only $3, so it wasn't going to be too expensive. When I got to the store, I realized that Yuki probably wouldn't like any hamster I brought home. They're solitary creatures unless they're brought up together.
So I decided that since I couldn't get a cage friend for Yuki, I would get two hamsters that would get along and put them in a cage next to Yuki. I asked the E-mart employee if the two I picked out were girls. He assured me they were. I hapily took them home and named them Hamu and Hamu because they were identical; we'd never be able to keep track of who was who!
For the next few weeks, I didn't give their genders a second thought. The employee had assured me that they were both girls, so they were! They both seemed to be growing to be the same size at the same rate.
But one Sunday right after, one of the Hamus started acting a little weird. She was running around the cage. Then she stopped, and sort of flattened herself against the floor of the cage. At this point, I picked up the cage and turned it so I could see what she was doing.
At that point tiny, squirmy, pink things started popping out of Hamus back end. She was having babies, seven of them. And one of the shes was actually a he! I freaked out! Derek and I looked up breeding hamsters online to see if there was anything we neded to do. The biggest thing was separating the male and female. We found out that hamsters can mate and conceive literally minutes after giving birth, and the father might eat the babies!
Even though it was a Sunday the proverbial ox was in the proverbial mire and I went to E-mart to get another cage for the boy Hamu and to see if perhaps E-mart would take the 7 babies once they were old enough to be separated from their mother. After finding someone who could understand and speak English, they agreed to take them for free. That made me happy because we couldn't keep 10 hamsters all in separate cages!
Baby hamsters are so cute! Especially Roborovski hamsters. They are so TINY! We cooked Mamma Hamu eggs and gave her extra tissue to make a nest for her little ones and watched them grow from teensy pink gummy bears to mini Hamus!
When it was time to take them to E-mart, we were really sad, but glad we didn't have to take care of 10 cages!!! :)
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