Our Amazing Hannah-bear

Our family has expanded once again. This time we have brought home a sister for Red Baron. The beauty of adoption is that not only is she of a different ethnicity but of a completely different species! Michael and I are very pleased with our selection and are amazed at how much we adore our new "child." We have bequeathed the name of Hannah upon her, as she is our first daughter. We chose this name in honor of my mother. She has been attempting to persuade me for years to name my first daughter Hannah and insists upon referring to our hypothetical daughter as Hannah. However, she may not appreciate our honor, as she is not very fond of rodents. Yes, that's right. Our new daughter is a rodent. Relative to the rat, the mouse, the squirrel, and the capybara (the largest rodent in the world-see picture below from our trip to the SD zoo). You may ask why we would bring home a rodent rather than a cat or a dog, but looking at these photos, I am sure you will agree that she is adorable. And after what Michael and I saw tonight, we have further discovered that she earns the title "The Amazing Hannah-bear." The Hannah part you know. The bear part is pretty straight forward, as Hannah is a Teddy Bear Hamster. But why the amazing you may ask. Because she accomplishes the most amazing feat each time that we fill her food dish. I believe it may be worthy enough to earn us $100 and a T-shirt from "The Planet's Funniest Animals" on Animal Planet.
Being a hamster, Hannah has a fun quad-level home. The top level she has converted into her bedroom where she spends about half of her time. The top-middle level is simply a transitory place that brings her from the top to the bottom. The bottom-middle level holds a platform for her water bottle and her food dish. Finally, the bottom level is lined with bedding and has a wheel on which she can exercise. The wheel is where she spends the other half of her time. All the levels are connected by a vertical tube that she climbs up and down. Today when I filled her food dish, she began by putting one pellet in her mouth, then another, then another. She continued to put all the pellets from the food dish into her mouth, puffing her cheeks out to resemble a chipmunk. We counted eight pellets in all. Now these are not your proportional to her body mass kind of pellets. Think horse pill vitamins for human scale. Most people would gag trying to swallow this thing. And she puffed out her cheeks to fit eight! You may further ask, as I did, did she digest said pellets? No. Instead she proceeded to crawl up the pipe to the top floor of her cage. She had to approach the opening three times, twisting and turning her body in order to fit her engorged cheeks through the opening. She finally managed to shimmy her way up to the top. By the time she squished her cheeks through the opening at the top level, Michael and I were rolling on the floor laughing at her antics. Once her body followed her cheeks through the opening, she found her favorite corner, burrowed into some bedding, and spit out all eight pellets one at a time. So, you may say that she is just a glorified rodent, but she is our Amazing Hannah-bear.
~Shannon