Snake EGGventure and Sickness

First, the bad news. For the past couple of weeks, we've been pretty sick. It was a really bad flu with lots of coughing, fevers, snot, Kleenex, medicine, etc. All of us got it. I've been home from work since last Friday. Joi got it really bad. We took her to urgent care on Saturday because she couldn't breathe and was in a lot of pain. They gave her a breathing treatment and some meds for Bronchitis. Not fun. Today, we are finally on the up. Gage and Gavin are finally showing some energy and are playing and laughing again. Joi and I felt well enough to try to super-clean/sanitize everything...but Joi may have overdone it. She's pooped. Still lots of coughing and snot...but things are looking better. We're hoping to return to normal soon.

The other news. We have three pet corn snakes that we bought in Colorado Springs over a year ago. They were pretty small when we got them and the pet store assured us that they were all females...since we kept them in the same cage and did not want babies. Well, Gavin's snake "Spitfire" was, in fact, a male. We caught him romancing or "mating", as the boys call it, with the other two females many, many times. It was interesting to watch. It's not every day you get to see snakes mating. Anyway, about a month ago, the two females stopped eating. A sign of pregnancy. Then they shed. A sign that they were about to give birth. So, I put a birthing box in their cage and removed the male snake. The birthing box consisted of a Tupperware container with some wet sponges in it. Within a day or two of putting the birthing box in the cage, Gage's snake "Crystal" gave birth to a clutch of about 8 eggs. They were huge. Larger than I expected. After birthing, she was exhausted and stayed in the birthing box to rest for a couple of days. Garrison's snake "Ferb" crawled in their with her and proceeded to birth another clutch of about 7 eggs. And then she crashed, too. Within a couple of days, they emerged from the birthing box and I was able to dispose of the eggs. We just don't have the facilities to care for the eggs and they didn't look healthy to begin with. So, I did what my Grandpa Longtin would have done and "took them behind the barn"...so to speak. Then I took Gavin to the nearest pet store that deals with snakes and asked if we could trade our male for a female. They allowed us to do that, and gave us a discounted rate on the new snake. Our new female snake is called "Tigress". Hopefully, she really is a female. The pet-store guy said he was 99% sure. I guess we'll see. Hopefully, that was the last foray into snake birthing for us. Unfortunately, we were so sick, it didn't occur to me to take pictures of the eggs. Oh well...