I just spent the last two hours buying sugar glider toys online — $150 dollars worth! We are super excited about our new pets. The sugar gliders themselves didn’t cost as much as we anticipated because Sara let us have both Ginger and Star for $250 instead of $175 each as they were priced originally. She said she decreased the price because Ginger and Star are older than when sugar gliders are typically sold. The original buyers fell through, that is why they were for sale for so long. We were going to wait until the next joeys are ready but were worried that there may not be two this time and Brian and I wanted a sugar glider for each of us. Ginger and Star are adorable, though, so we are very happy to have them.

Our damage so far is about $500 (sugar gliders, cage, toys and cage accessories) and we haven’t even started buying food yet! Pets can be so expensive! It’s less expensive than raising kids, though.

Anyway, Brian is really digging the whole sugar gliders thing. He even cleaned the spare bedroom that we’ve been using as a dump site for miscellaneous junk. It used to be that you could barely even walk in there. He cleaned it yesterday and now there’s plenty of space of the sugar gliders’ cage (when it arrives), his art desk and the old bean bag chair. The cat boxes are still in there, though. I will take a picture for you when the we get the cage set up.

We are totally looking forward to having our new babies. We’re already planning their diet. We’ve even created it a special feeding dome for them.

We found out from Sara that sugar gliders are notorious food flingers so the cage and adjacent walls end up getting coated with food bits. Apparently, BML (the special food mix that we’re feeding our babies along with the mandatory fruits and veggies; the BML is necessary so they get all the essential vitamins and minerals they need to stay healthy) dries like glue and is pretty tough to scrape off.

So Brian and I came up with the idea of a feeding dome. The idea went through several incarnations. It went from a plastic igloo thing, to a waffle box thing that we were going to put over the food dish (so that if they start flinging food it’ll just go on the walls of the box thing), to finally an upside down Tupperware thing with a hole on the side of it for the sugar gliders to crawl through. I’ll take a picture of it for you guys next time. It’s one of our old Tupperware containers (well, it’s not really Tupperware brand; it’s one of those generic cheap ones that you get at Wal-Mart but you know what I mean) that we don’t use anymore. Brian got his Dremel tool and drilled a hole on the side of it. The plan is to use it upside down. The food will be on the lid and it will be placed upside down inside the cage. The idea is to get the sugar gliders to crawl in and eat inside the container. The dome shaped bottom (which is now the top) will keep the food from getting flung all over the room.

Brilliant, isn’t it? Brian and I are actually pretty creative about jerry-rigging things. It sounds perfect in theory but we’ll find out if it actually works after our first feeding which will be in a couple of weeks. I’m so excited, I’m counting the hours!