A New Life

Life is strange sometimes, wonderfully strange. Not long after my gentle, old dog left us last week, we received a call to care-take a hamster for three weeks. Today we brought "Creme Fouette" (translation: Whipped Cream") to our house. He's a little shy at the moment, having gone for a drive, been shaken (not stirred) and getting used to the new sounds and smells of our house. I am so happy to be given this chance to take care of another life, grateful to be entrusted to the daily watch. It's filling a gap and hopefully will be enough to satisfy the recent requests by Riley to have a rodent of his own. It is his responsibility to feed, water and exercise. For some reason I have agreed to the more mundane cleaning of the "cage" and tubes and the general and regular checking of the whole apparatus so that Whipped Cream, a.k.a. Houdini, does not escape. I thought it prudent to take a lot of photos early on in case I need to make a quick trip to the pet shop for a double.

I thought I would be housing a wire cage, about 1 foot by 2 feet; instead I have a space age acrylic apparatus with multiple tubes and passageways branching off. Yowza. Whoever said, "it's a dog's life" never hamster-sat a modern-day hamster.

Perfect. NOT!

Even though he looks angelic and I can talk a blue streak about my boy, he is not perfect. And yesterday, his birthday, was a prime example. First off, he was quite ticked off at me when I only exposed three or four presents before school. Yeah, I let him open them too. Then after school (his) and work (mine) I piled up the other presents I had stored away. He looked a little disappointed, then after opening them all he was really disappointed. Is that all there is? That summed up his attitude and his words. I am going to be brief and say I didn't necessarily handle it like Donna Reed or Florence Henderson. So I slept fitfully, felt awful all day today while he was at school and I was at work. It was worse because it was shades of my own childhood, those things that both scarred me and contributed to who I am today. But not what I wanted my own child to experience as part of his childhood. Tonight I got the chance to talk to him about it. I apologized for acting like an ass and he apologized for acting like one too. And when it was time for bedtime stories, I chose the children's version of "Feed The Good Wolf". I admitted that yesterday I had been feeding my bad wolf and I was sorry for making him feel rotten on his birthday. He admitted he had done the same. And we kissed and made up. Neither of us is perfect but I am glad we can have an honest dialogue about our feelings. That is something I didn't have growing up. And I know I am doing some things differently, hopefully some things right too.

Eating some Nerds tonight, after bath and with yesterday's "crown". God, I love him.


P.S. I was holding out on one big present, waiting for his father to arrive back in town and have a proper celebration with cake. And maybe that was why I over-reacted, part of me was ticked off that he really knew there was more.