Things we don't share w/ our Social Worker..

Now this might be going a little overboard in our sense of niceness... Remember this wonderful brilliant idea that Santa had LAST Christmas? the Chinese hamster? He was a fine critter, that Mark got stuck dealing with, as we housed him in his CAGE in the basement. Fast forward to Vacation in October to the beach. Let me remind you, getting ready for the beach, packing for FOUR children, homeschooling, organizing a vacation for 27 people, I could go on. I managed to remember to get the dog kenneled, that must count for something? But i forgot about the hamster, as did every other human being living in my house. Never even entered our minds, till I walked in the door home from vacation and it hit me, WE FORGOT WE HAD A HAMSTER!! So we send Mark to see, expecting to find a DEAD starved hamster. But no sign of hamster. The cage is empty. What? Did he evaporate? We figured he escaped. In our basement, which is, well, a basement. FULL of junk. (see next post below to get an idea) How in the world would you ever find something the size of a mouse down there? Winter came and we smelled burning a few times w/ the furnace and thought, is that him cooking? (oh that is just so gross!) Then comes time to start cleaning out our storage for the yard sale. As we begin pulling out stuff, we begin finding PILES of dog food behind shelves. in places that the dog can't get to, nor would anyone else. We are talking BIG piles. After pulling EVERYTHING out, we figured we found about 4 pounds of dog food stockpiled down there. Either this hamster is set for winter, or we have something else large down there. DISGUSTING! We cleaned out ALL dog food, and set a trap. We read to make a ramp into a bucket of food, they will drop in and not get out. We set this a week ago. no sign of hamster. Or anything else. But then tonight........ Makenna ran down to let Hershey out of her cage and began SCREAMING in that girly girl screaming way. The hamster was just walking around by Hersheys cage. Well THANK GOODNESS we now know it is a hamster and not a rat or anything! (hey, if you saw these huge piles of food, you would fear to!) Did Makenna, who is the HAMSTER OWNER, try to catch the hamster? No, she runs off screaming! And I am not about to go down there, I don't do rodents. SO, any ideas on how to catch him, PLEASE help us!

I like to think we are nice people, we have compassion on helpless things and all, but for goodness sakes, I have my limits and letting the hamster have the RUN of the basement is beyond those limits! Let me add free run for THREE MONTHS!! Can you even imagine had he ran by the social worker during her visit? That visit was fun enough w/ Sage coming out eating CAT FOOD for the CAT we don't own! ( i will save that for another post)

Maybe for our yard sale we will have a hamster cage out there. With or Without hamster, to be determined!