My mom cleaned my pen today. She usually cleans the birds cages on Saturday, so she just continued on and cleaned mine, too. She said she was sorry about the wonderful disaster I had made of my pen. First she said that if I had my babies before today then she could clean my pen with all the birth-litter, too. But she said later that she didn't want my babies born in a dirty pen.

I wasn't very happy about that, though. She gave me a new stack of newspaper to shred up, and in order for her to know how unimpressed I was, I only hauled the new newspaper to my house. There is no way I'm going to shred all that new newspaper when I had a perfectly functional nest only moments before! I totally refused to shred up the new newspaper.

Daddy saw this and offered to shred up some newspaper for me, and I was elated! Dad is such a cool guy! But then Mom told him to only use black & white paper, nothing with color on it. He dug through some newspaper and said it was nearly impossible to find paper that has only black & white print, so he soon gave up. Drats.

A little later on, right before my pictures were taken, Mom checked in on me. I had given only a token effort at managing the newspaper she gave me. So she sat and talked to me, and started shredding up a couple of pieces of the newspaper that I was pretending to have trouble with. Pretty soon I would just grab the piece I needed shredded, and Mom shredded it for me! I took total advantage of this, and brought her newspaper I wasn't even using, just for the free shredding!

So when picture-time came tonight, I was still kind of busy bringing all the new, shredded paper into my house. Mom says she didn't mind shredding my paper for me because she's still not convinced the ink is safe for me. Dad keeps telling her that rats live in far worse conditions than I, and thrive. Go Dad! But Mom is worried about me... I guess she's just being Mom.

I heard Mom talking to her mom on the telephone earlier. She is invited over for dinner tomorrow - and if I don't have my babies yet, I get to come with! Whoopie!!!

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