Small glimpses into my life with odd, but fun, children.

Wednesday, April 22, 2009

Story from the Past - On the Death of a Hamster


This isn't directly something my kids said/did, but it involved them, and I was reminded of the situation when I read Michael Ian Black's story of a death in his family. This series of events took place about 2 years ago.

When my oldest daughter's hamster died, we still had all the setup, and the kids wanted to replace it with a new hamster. I very firmly said, "NO," which led my husband to think I meant they needed something else that could live in the hamster cage. A week later he took the kids out "to the park" and they came back with three pet mice - one for each kid.

If you think one hamster smells like pee, three mice smell like a urinal that hasn't been cleaned in a month.

About two weeks after the mice showed up, my then 4 yr old woke up to discover one of the mice had died during the night, and, as an honor to their lost friend, the other mice had started eating it.

After that, the kids lost interest in the other two mice, and I went "to the park" one day while the kids were at school, and my husband was at work. Thank God the pet store didn't try to charge me to take back those mice. Nobody ever commented on the missing pets, but if they'd asked I would have said that the Mouse Rapture had occurred and obviously both of our mice had been among the chosen.