The one where Joey gets a (sort of) pet

My grandson Joey, who is going to be five next month, (mind blown), has been wanting a pet for quite a long time now, specifically a mouse. Given the amount of trauma that Bee, Joey’s mum, went through when she found a dead mouse in her vacuum cleaner recently, I can’t see it happening any time soon.

Luckily for Bee, Joey and probably the mouse, there is an alternative.

Little Live Pets, available from Very.co.uk, are a way for children to experience what it means to take care of a pet, without the inevitable responsibility for you as a parent of having to pay for them/look after them/feed them/do every damn thing with them when the child loses interest.

I was very kindly sent a selection of Little Live Pets for Joey to play with. He started off with the Mama Surprise Guinea Pigs – a mummy guinea pig that needs feeding and petting before she’s ready to have her three babies. Joey had mixed feelings about it initially. Although he loved the idea of caring for his own pet, he was anxious about the new babies and what that would entail for him. He spent some time at home with Bee crying and saying he ‘wasn’t ready’, but once it was explained to him that they wouldn’t be running around the floor or bursting out of the mummy guinea pig when he wasn’t expecting it he was much more relaxed about the whole thing.

Every time a guinea pig is born, they also come with a little surprise package of accessories, which Joey was very taken with. The first night he had his guinea pigs at home he entrusted them to Bee to look after when he went to bed. The next morning he got up and went to check on them.

‘I put them in the cage when I went to bed,’ Bee told him, ‘after they’d had a play on the sofa.’

‘Oh, did they come alive then?’ Joey asked, matter-of-factly. You can see why he might have been worried about the birth.

The next pets I introduced were the mice – top of his real life pet list – and the hatching chick. While the mouse does have the option to ‘birth’ her young and the chick will hatch itself if you switch it on, I didn’t want to overwhelm Joey after the guinea pigs, so we just played with them without any surprise element.

For me, this is one of the things that’s really good about the Little Live Pets range – you can go full into the live aspect if you want to, and all of them can be reset for the babies to be born over and over, but if you don’t want to do that, they are still just as fun to play with as they are. Joey really enjoyed manually hatching the chick and popping it in and out of its little house, and surprising me by hatching the baby mice from an egg. It was a great conversation starter too, giving Joey the opportunity to learn how some animals have babies from eggs and some give birth to live babies.

Overall Joey really loved playing with the Little Live Pets and I’m sure they will teach him lots of valuable skills for when he does get a pet of his own. You can check out Little Live Pets as part of the wide range of toys at Very.