We are now in week 5 with our sugar gliders, Mojo and Serendipity. We got them Dec 5 2008.
In the last article on the subject I talked about how we took a step back with Mojo. That was maybe a week ago. Well, things are better again. Make no mistake, he is definitely not bonded to us, but it is not such an ordeal to get hold of him. He still crabs each time we try to take him out of his “bed”. First, when he knows we are coming, he just looks at us like “are you really going to make me go through this again”, then as we get close he starts crabbing and carrying on like he is standing on hot coals or something. But once we have him in our hands the crabbing subsides and he proceeds to climb all around us and pretty much chills out. Once we try to grab him to take him off of us he might also start the crabbing again, but he pretty much always lets us pick him up without too much fuss though he does make it difficult by standing right in that spot on the back that you cannot reach and shifting slightly away from whichever hand is just about to reach him. Bites are much more rare, but they are still present. The good news is that getting to him used to be much harder.
I have been making an effort to get both sugargliders atleast 3 hours of pouchtime everyday with someone in the family and atleast 1/2 hour “out and about time”. Out and about time is time not in the cage, but not in a pouch either. This is typically spent running around ON us. My three year old daughter just loves have Serendipity and / or Mojo crawling around on her. She likes to go look in the mirror at them and to pet Serendipity. She knows shes taking a chance when she pets Mojo, so she does him a little bit less.
Last night during the out and about time I took the gliders into the kids playroom (repurposed dining room).
The kids were already in bed, the toys picked up, so the gliders had a place they could
kind of check out without a whole lot of screaming and carrying about going on. In the room there is a giant, denim covered beanbag on which I just put them down and waited to see what happened. Sadly… not much. It was pretty uneventful. They checked things out a bit, Mojo went and found the side of beanbag away from me and stayed there and Serendipity just kind of wandered about. They both eventually got off the beanbag, but still did not do anything that looked “fun”… Until…
I remembered that supposedly they like anything that is cat toy like. I was curious whether that included chasing strings. Apparently it does! Serendipty had a great time chasing it all over the beanbag. It was pretty cute. Mojo didn’t get involved, but he looked like he wanted to. He contantly eyed the string and then my hand that was wiggling the string around. Apparently he decided his concerns about the hand outweighed his desire to get in on the fun. But it looked like a pretty even battle. Maybe nextime he’ll get involved.
We got them some peach yogurt. They don’t seem impressed. They both prefer apple sauce and pretty much stuck their nose up at the peach yogurt. Perhaps we will try some blueberry yogurt next time we get to the grocery store.
I’ll report back when there is more to report.