Friends,
You know, you raise a hamster the best way you know. Try to teach her to play fair, to get along with others, to play by the rules, to take responsibility for her actions. And then one day you realize you’ve been talking to a hamster and unless you’re food, she won’t give you the time of day. My hamster is guilty of this tunnel vision. She routinely tries to make a run for it when we grant her limited freedom. She doesn’t pick up her plastic tunnels when she’s done running through them. Why just today two of my darling children got into a predicament because of Jubs’ refusal to follow the rules. Let me explain:
Four hours ago now, I heard the kids laughing in the other room – and then a BIG sound like falling furniture. Parents usually know what sounds they need to follow up on and this was one of them. The wooden filing cabinet and Kyle were on the floor, both in unnatural positions. Summoning my long dormant nursing skills I realized I needed to tend to the one with internal organs first.
Me -“What hurts?”
K- “ Oh….. my foot”
Me – ”Well, take off your sock and let’s see if you broke anything”.
With the sock off I saw a definite crush/scrape on the top of his foot and the baby toe looked like it had been recently orphaned. In the time it took me to get a bag of ice and return it had tripled in size and changed a couple shades of purple.
“Everybody in the car, we’re going to the ER”. On the way there I asked how the injury occurred. In the ER the Doctor asked what happened.
“Mom, you tell him” said Kyle.
“Well Doctor. It seems that Kyle was sitting ON TOP OF the filing cabinet and his sister tried to check his reflexes with the hamster tunnel”.
“And,” Kyle interjects. “Your knee reflexes are not in your stomach so I grabbed the hamster tunnel and….the filing cabinet and I fell”.
The Doctor looked genuinely interested with our explanation so I think we were the first case like that he’d seen today. So, because of Jubs leaving her tunnels lying around like that, my little sweetheart Rachel got the idea that she could check Kyle’s reflexes. “It was either the tunnel or a jackhammer”, she told me. And nobody leaves jackhammers lying around…
So x-rays and the Doctor told us that Kyle’s got a broken toe and crutches for awhile and Jubs is oblivious to the pain she has caused us ( not to mention the $50 co-pay).You know, you raise a hamster the best
way you know…
Here's hoping you had a better day than I did,
Carol
