>>Interesting because my 9-year-old daughter has been bugging me for a hamster for some time now. Now I know to buy a pregnant one so we don't have to feed it! :-)
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>Take a guinea pig instead. Much more cute, and they don't try to dig into your walls. We've had them for years now, and the only problem we had was to hunt sufficient number of friends who would take the piglets :).

That's the problem: "... We've had them for years now ..." I was banking on the fact that the critters only live for c. 2 years, long before which the kids will be tired of them and the drudgery of keeping them alive and not smelling falls on us, while the kids just wait for them to die. I've seen it happen with friends.