Vacuuming Gerbils Is Never A Good Idea!!!

I thought I would write a blog that would make people laugh, of course at my own expense...I will take one for the team. It is no secret that I have done and said some pretty crazy things; the following is one of those stories.

January 2007

We had been in New York for a few months (so we were still living in the old house), the gerbils were still babies and had been Jordan's for about 3 months.
I was upstairs vacuuming and everyone knows how OCD I am about having things clean...so I had the brilliant idea to vacuum the gerbils. KIDS DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME!!!
So I put the attachment that you use to do the stairs on the hose and proceeded to vacuum Indiana Jones & Mocha Joe. I started at their little heads and went slowly down their little bodies. I was thinking to myself that this was a really good idea and that they were already looking shinier, but it could be better. So I took the attachment off the hose and well....I guess I was a couple sandwiches short of a picnic basket because all of a sudden Mocha Joes little butt got sucked into the vacuum. Life completely went into slow motion...so many things were going through my mind in this short period of time, such as;

Wes is going go kill me!!
How do you get a gerbil out of a vacuum?
I am going to have to clean the carpet.
Is poor little Mocha going to suffer:( ?
If Mocha was a Guinea Pig, I would not be having this problem right now.
Where are the girls...I am going to traumatize them for life...

Many other thoughts were rushing through my mind and I guess I was screaming, "Mocha! Mocha!" because the girls had run in from the other room to see what was happening and that was when I got my brain back because I grabbed the cord to the vacuum and ripped it out of the wall and Mocha plopped back down into her cage. I wish I had a picture to show because it looked like she was wearing a skirt, all of her bottom fur was sticking straight out and fluffed. Audrey and Hannah just looked at me in bewilderment, as if to say, "What were you thinking? We know not to vacuum the gerbils. Why would you?" I know that every time I have vacuumed since, they come to make sure I am not doing anything stupid or endangering the lives of small defenseless creatures. I guess it is good to have people to watch out for you even if they are 5 and 7. I can only imagine what the gerbils think when I vacuum...I bet they have some pretty choice words.

All I can say is Mocha is so lucky that I did not have a Dyson, because she would have been a goner.

Wesley gives the gerbils their weekly sand baths and they are very clean and happy and, yes, I know that I can not put the gerbils in the bathtub because they would drown...just in case anyone was worried. Though gerbils are very good swimmers.

Its probably a really good thing that Whiskers lives at the zoo, who knows what I would try to do with a Meerkat.