Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

If last month wasn’t hectic enough, a few days before Christmas my granddaughter Adeline came home with two female hamsters she quickly named Cookies and Cream. Her mother Lauren pulled the hamster cage – and everything else that had survived longer than our last hamster – from the shed. The wire cage appeared sturdy, but what do we know?

Two days later, Cookies and Cream disappeared. Lauren begged me to tell her where I hid them. She begged her sister Elise to admit the hamsters died, and Elise was shopping for new ones. While Lauren begged I searched under furniture, in shoes, at the bottom of the hamper, and along baseboards. The only thing I didn’t want to find was little holes in the sheetrock suggesting our new pets sought a home in the wall. Nothing.

Hoping they’d soon get hungry, we constructed a trap. We set the little hamster bridge near books stacked to form a stairway next to a deep bowl. Inside the bowl we placed hamster food.

Christmas Eve truly found us without a creature stirring.

On Christmas Day our extended family opened gifts, ate lunch, then, armed with flashlights and hope, performed a grid search of my home. We didn’t find the hamsters, and I lost all hope.

Screams from Adeline’s room two days later alerted me of the capture of Cream! Our primitive trap worked and Lauren bought a large, plastic cage. The addition of peanut butter to the trap resulted in return of Cookies a couple of days later, and now both hamsters – and my walls – are safe.

I am also safe in the knowledge that with the family I have, I will never be bored.

 

Ronny Michel can be reached at rmichel@rtconline.com.