While prone to high levels of drama myself, I have a strange intolerance of it in my children. I wanted her to stop crying. Wasn't it, after all, sort of her fault he got away? Was she really that surprised? For my part, I found his escape to be a relief. It's a stressful thing, monitoring your young children's first experiences with a pet. No? The manner of his future death was always so unclear to me. Would he get eaten by a cat? Would he get squeezed to death by a 4 year old? Would he die of some awful hamster disease or escape and rot in the ventilation ducts like Chris' childhood pet hamster?
The uncertainty of how this first pet experience would come to a close kept me vaguely uneasy, so to have him simply disappear, well that solved a huge problem for me.
But this meant a lot to Bela. Earlier in the week she had experienced her first "death". Her pet grasshopper, who inhabits an aquarium with her new pet crickets and one dead moth, passed away (not so) suddenly a few days prior. I should have known by the amount of tears shed over hopper that the loss of Little John would be an important and serious one.
In light of her future pet shop, Bela views all interaction between her and any given animal to be a "test". The more tests she passes, the better she'll be at running a pet store. The more tests she views herself as failing, the darker and less certain her entrepreneurial future appears. And last week things were looking downright gloomy.
In hindsight, it was perhaps not the best idea to comfort her by promising she could take her allowance and buy one of those super friendly hamsters Daddy pointed out last week at the pet store, the ones that don't bite when you hold them. In hindsight, we should have lingered in the tragedy of the situation a bit longer and let her deal with her grief.
For early the next morning before the girls were awake, while I was hobbling around the apartment getting ready and Chris was making coffee in the kitchen, he heard a familiar Noise. A scratching. A non-feline clawing at organic material. He investigated.
There, on our back porch (which doubles as a playroom), stuck in a box of discarded paint jars and the rejected remnants of art projects, was our silly little Russian Dwarf. Chris scooped him up and presented him to sleeping Bela, who from the top bunk shouted with joy and then immediately looked concerned.
"Does this mean I can't get one of those new, nicer hamsters?"
Is it any surprise, then, that since the day of his valiant rescue I have found his cage door standing open not once, but twice? Clearly, this is a test Bela has decided she wants to fail. Lucky for us, Little John has been thoroughly traumatized and has no interest in escape. The shiny new hamster will have to wait.
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