Always Beware When The Room Smells Like Hamster And You Don't Own A Hamster

For those of you who have had the good sense not to reproduce, I take my hat off to you. For those of you with children, my prayers go out to you.

I have a little girl named Lucy and she will be the one who peppers my blond hair with gray before my time. Lucy is a born actress and she frustrates me to no end. She has a horrible habit that I'd like to tell you about.

I go in one morning to wake her up for school and I could swear that the room smelled like a hamster. We don't own a hamster, but the smell persisted. My sense of smell is the dullest of all my senses after an unfortunate bottle rocket incident as a child. I wrote the weird smell off to farts in the night from onion rings the night before.

I don't smell it when I put her to bed that night but the door has been open all day.

The next morning I go to get her up and her bedroom reeks of hamster, right down to the ceder chip bedding and the little black grains of rice they call their poop. The room smells of hamster but I only have one eye open and need a cup of coffee in the worst way, so I will investigate later after the kids are on the bus. I forgot all about it until bedtime that night.

Lucy and I go to get PJ's for bed and the room smells like a zoo-sized hamster cage! Five year olds operate under the idea that when you are done with something you drop it where you are. Should you want it later, it will be in the place you dropped it. If it isn't there, you cannot look for it yourself but must round up a posse. Needless to say, five year olds don't tend to be neat and tidy.

I can't stand the mystery any longer and go searching for the hamster smell. I clean the room and put everything in it's place. Still no luck. The room stinks of rodent. I get down on my belly and marine crawl to the farthest back corner under her bed and find a boiled egg I had made two weeks ago.

To say that it looked like a cancerous ulcer would have been putting it kindly. I was afraid to pick it up lest the zombie chick inside bite me. It was rapidly disposed of when a stake was driven through it's heart.

From somewhere on Flannery's side of the family, Lucy gets the inclination to hide food like a squirrel. I can't explain it. She always tucks a snack away for later. I've started to find juice boxes and Doritos hidden in various closets. If she is trying to prepare for Doom's Day, let's hope she is taking her cues from Charlton Heston and not David Koresh.

Doc