More than a few times the number of babies I had hatching out pushed me to the brink of a nervous breakdown. I remember one day standing in one room looking at all the egg hatching containers. I used color dots to indicate the status of the eggs inside. Red dots meant they had all hatched out and ready to be set up in individual containers and offered food. Anyway, that one day there were a LOT of containers with red dots and I remembered thinking that there was just no way possible I was going to get them all set up before they would just start dying on me. I was nearly overcome with the compulsion to open the door to the reptile building and just start running into the woods screaming. I don't think I would have stopped. But I got a hold of myself and just hunkered down and got it done, somehow.
At the peak of SerpenCo, my limiting factor was "how many one day old pinky mice can I get out of the mouse colony." I would have liked to be on a 5 day schedule, but often times that wasn't possible. I HAD to get the babies onto frozen pinkies as quickly as possible, one reason being that it was killing me with the time I had to spend in the mouse building just searching for those one day olds. I had to go through every mouse cage every day, and that took a couple of hours.
Sorry, I digress..... Or did I regress?
Shoot for a 5 day schedule. That seemed to work best for babies. If you drag it out to 12 days or more, they will die on you. Yeah, sometimes we were doing too many shows and there just wasn't enough time to go around.
Man I am glad to be out of that. I know Connie is too. It was very hard on both of us.