Dear Ferret Folks-

If I seem more chatty lately, it is undoubtedly because I spent a few
weeks trapped with my Mother. She is wonderful, but talks for hours at
a time. She will even keep talking while someone reads in front of her.
Nothing stops her. After a while, I get a hankering for human contact
that is *not* my mother. And so I turn to the keyboard, and experience
INSTANT vicarious human contact at my speed. This is purely
*decompression.*

Well, I have more to say because my nephew did something cuuuute....
That would be Alex, the five year old. He spent the night at our house
last night, his parents were in a jam. He spends a lot of nights here.
In the morning I open the cage door, and any ferret that wishes to romp
may come out and do so. Usually both boys do, but this morning Todd
felt like sleeping in.

This bummed Alex out. Hebert is fun to play with, yes, but Todd is more
interactive, more fun. My husband and I explicitly told Alex "You don't
touch Todd, let him stay where he is. He knows what he wants."
Meanwhile, Hebert did his romping and stomping alone.

After about five minutes of this my husband and I heard tuneless kid
singing coming from the ferret room. Something about "Wake up, wake
up..." and "La-la-la's." Alex was in front of the cage *serenading*
Todd awake. Well, he wasn't *touching* Todd. He was singing to him.

That kid is going to be a lawyer.

You know those tuneless kid songs, the ones kids make up as they go
along. This one featured a lot of "Todd's" and "wake ups." My husband
and I were too far away to make out all the words, but we knew what was
happening, and we were snuggled up together on the living room sofa,
laughing as quietly as we could so as not to disrupt the song. A second
chorus began, apparently the first one was not loud enough. We imagined
the little kid face pressed up against the bars, right next to the
long-suffering weasel who most likely did not appreciate this musical
tribute.

Wake up Todd did, and he finally left the cage at which point he was
snapped up in two hands triumphantly by the little lawyer. Todd was
carried over to us, carefully, in TWO hands (that's the rule) and the
little lawyer asked "Why is Todd shaking?"

Poor Todd. His head fur was mashed sideways. He was still warm from the
hammie, and his back legs were shaking uncontrolably. He had a look on
his face that said it all. "What the HEY? I was sleeping...will someone
shut this kid up, please?" We explained why Todd's legs were shaking,
and that Todd would like to be *down*, now, to do his necessary
shaking. Todd immediately ran beneath a chair and did not emerge for
a good ten minutes. By then the little lawyer had forgotten all about
him, and was pestering Hebert, who took it all gamely.

The child has been returned to his parents, and the boys are back
in their cage. It would be fun to have a recording of Alex's little
"wake-up" song to serenade the ferrets with. Fun for *us*, not fun
for the ferrets.

La-la-la...la la la....gonna carry you upside-down the length of the
house, wake up wake up wake up...."

Alexandra in MA

[Posted in FML 6252]