She had a bad day

Emma (9) wanted nothing but a hamster from Santa.  At the eleventh hour (in his defense, it's hard to conceal a living creature for very long) Santa's elf asked a few questions at the pet store about the available hamsters and purchased a cute little dwarf one.  Emma woke up on Christmas morning to a hamster dream come true.

She was ecstatic and named him Charcoal in honor of his coloring.

Emma has worked hard to cultivate her relationship with Charcoal, who has rarely lived up to her expectation of what a sweet, loving hamster should be.  His temperament is less-than-cuddly and he has a nasty biting habit.

Nonetheless, Emma soldiered on (despite bouts of tears lamenting the big gap between expectation and reality), keeping his cage immaculate, creating elaborate play structures out of tubes and boxes, taking inordinate amounts of pictures of her beloved Charcoal.

As we prepared to leave for our 3-week summer vacation, she asked her best friend, a fellow hamster owner, to take care of him.  After carefully placing Charcoal's newly-cleaned cage in her friend's bedroom, Emma cheerfully said goodbye.

Emma was anxious to pick up Charcoal after such a long separation. As she was walking out the door of her friend's house, cage in hand, Emma casually said, "Charcoal's in a really deep sleep.  He usually wakes up when I shake the water bottle."

Red flag.

Charcoal never woke up.  The poor fellow had gone to hamster heaven.

Understandably, Emma struggled with her feelings.  She didn't want to be mad at her best friend ("Charcoal must have been really, really sick!"), but was shocked and upset about his relatively early demise.

That evening, Emma chose to make Jell-O for the Family Night treat.  She went to retrieve the box from the pantry, only to discover that it wasn't Jell-O after all.  She teared up and said, "I thought this was going to be a great day, but it's turned out to be a really bad one."

I understood.  Some days are like that.

After a short grieving period, we headed to the pet store and asked lots and lots of questions.  Emma decided against the hamster with one red and one black eye (when asked by one of the kids why the hamster looked like that, the store employee answered in a perfect Texas drawl, "That's just the way God made him, honey") and chose an adorable teddy bear hamster with two matching eyes.  She named him Vector, stating, "I like to choose unique hamster names."  The employee explained that, because dwarfs are "cage aggressive," she had recently convinced the management to discontinue carrying them.

That would have been helpful information for Santa's elf.

Here's to many years (or at least more than 7 months) with Vector.  Emma and I both hope that he'll do a little more cuddling and a lot less biting than his predecessor.