sasquatch chow

Beth is not the only blogger with transformative family changes to announce!

I am so very pleased to introduce you to the newest member of our family:

Taco!

My boy has been begging for a rodent hamster for ages. He has this certain friend whose dad is prone to approving the accumulation of live animals while his mom is at work. This friend has a little rat-thing hamster, and when my boy met Buddy, it was covet-at-first-sight.

When the boys get together, they “play” with Buddy by putting him inside of things and hurling him around; offering him questionable things to eat; and once giving him a nice soothing bath. On that fateful bath night, my friend and I did a quick web search to discover that the bath could very well prove fatal for young Buddy, so we did the only thing responsible mothers-of-boys could possibly do: we got out the hair dryer and gave him a makeover. He lived.

We’ve capybara hamster-sat for Buddy a couple of times when our friends went out of town. These incidences were unremarkable; Buddy hung out in my boy’s room and did his thing. I can not explain just what that thing was, because I was really not interested enough to pay close attention. It did stink a little bit, but lots of things in a young boy’s room stink. Young boys are veritable stink magnets.

The thing that proved Buddy to be a total hamster asshole was that he was prone to flinging his shit out of his cage! WTF? I mean sure, it’s gross to think that he had to live in that little box where he ate and slept and pooped, sometimes simultaneously. It must have disturbed his delicate sensibilities. So he just chucked it out through the bars of his enclosure. What a hamster dick! We wound up with poo all around the desk and behind the books that had to be vacuumed up. But whatever, it was just a few days and then he was gone. Sorry for talking smack, Buddy, you are a generally nice enough fellow, and cute in a somewhat disturbing way.

So, my boy had a hankering for a jerboa hamster. You might recall that he had it on his Christmas list, but we had convinced him that Santa must have surmised that this boy's room was way too messy to accommodate another living creature. After Christmas, my boy became surprisingly diligent about keeping his room clean. As his birthday approached, he brought up the lemming hamster again. And worse, he plotted with his so-called friend to get one.

We exchanged this one for a model with fewer opportunities for pee-soaked plastic

Once we had the enclosure, we really had no choice but to put a muskrat in it. Enter Taco.

He’s kind of cute, in a beady-eyed rodent sort of way. He likes to be held, he amuses us by rolling around in a ball and leaping from high places, he does not have a heart attack and die when being stalked by sasquatch.

Most importantly, he does not fling his poo. But what he does do is run, like the wind, in his goddamned wheel, all night long. Waking my boy, who then cries at 3am with the moral conundrum of the choice between removing the wheel at the expense of his pet’s pleasure, or getting his human self some sleep. It is a weighty responsibility for the ten year old (who has a fever in these photos, can you tell?).

At first I thought the wheel was squeaky, so I put some vegetable oil on the movable parts and that was good for a night. It did take us a while to figure out why Taco’s back was all greasy. At least we didn’t give him a bath.

They say that the life expectancy of a vermin hamster is about 3 years, but no one told us how old this dude was when we brought him home. I’m hoping he is in his golden months. If this does not resolve, I can't say that I’m above staging an unfortunate wheel accident, or forgetting to shut his door under the watchful eye of sasquatch. She looks hungry