# My Four Boys



## Morbius (Mar 10, 2019)

Hiii! Thought it was about time I posted here with the story of the rats. So first boy I ever got was Possum. He’s the result of an unwanted litter that was dropped at a local pet store when they legit had just been born and had their eyes still closed. The workers there nursed the babies for weeks then he and siblings were put out for sale the last week of January. I went into the place because I'd been doing a ton of online research about rats but the husband unit said he wouldn't be on board to new pets unless I at least handled some first. I guess to know what I was getting into. I called all the pet stores in my area, all had feeders (I felt intimidated by feeders as a new rat parent.) except this one that says they have one male rat left from the litter. I say I'll come in first thing Sunday morning and promise the hubs this is just for experience and we aren't ready to bring anyone home yet. So here I am staring down at this TINY thing in my hand that blinks up at me and the store at best is daycare level noisy, and they have lizards by the rat cage, and dogs, and human children who seemed to be completely unsupervised one of which tried to pick up five ferrets at once and then whined because they got bit.

I looked at the husband who is ever patient with me and saw me pulling the puppy dog eyes and he nodded and there we were with a Midwest cage on express shipping from chewy and a little boy who was too scared to even come out to eat. From his size we wagered he was four to five weeks old at most. We bought a travel cage for the next two days, Oxbow, and a bottle but honest to god he was so small and timid I was worried that what I was doing was giving him a quiet stress-free place to die. He survived! I got him to eat, drink. He curled up on me and slept. It was perf, except of course he was growing up alone in a huge cage with no friends. So after hunting facebook and Craigslist for a week I found someone with two boys left and drove an hour only to have her say. "Hey, I know I said 5$ for one but I don't want one left alone. Would you take the other for free?" So now we have three counting Z the white ribbon of a rat, and Varney, the agouti hooded little sleep bag. Three is good right? One heck of an increase from one rat to three. I'd have to be insane to add to that. SO one of the breeders I initially contacted on Facebook had said the beginning of March she'd have some boys ready so of course I message her because I dunno I thought one from a good breeder would give me a nice temperament baseline to know if the others are actually insane. So now we have Nicodemus, the silvery little upstart who will tackle anything that moves. Enclosed is a pic of Possum at the pet store if it works. XD I'm terrible at HTML.


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