The Hamsters of my Youth

I love a good blog! My friend Ally on her blog
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing told us all about her hamsters the other day. It’s a great little story and worth the read. If you had hamsters when you were a kid, like I did, then you can really relate.

My brother and I got two hamsters when we were growing up. They were a lot of fun and we really enjoyed them. We named them “Fatty” and “Skinny” because one was fat and the other was... uh… skinny - kids can be SO creative when it comes to naming their pets.

We were young, probably 8 and 10 when we got them. Fortunately for my folks, they brought us up well and we were good about caring for them as we were supposed to. Not that we didn’t complain at times, but we did our chores when it came to caring for them.

We used to play with them all the time. We built forts out of paper towel and toilet paper tubes for them to run through, we’d use a bunch of old boxes for them to scurry around, and we’d shred paper for them to play in. We always loved to watch them in their cage as they took turns racing on their exercise wheel. We also used to have one of those yellow plastic hamster tubes that they would scamper through.

I know that they got out of their cage periodically and did some exploring around the house. We also had cats and dogs at the same time, but to the best of my knowledge, there were never any serious confrontations.

We had them for a few years. Fatty – who loved to eat – tended to store food in his cheeks. Well, he stored something there a little too long, it became infected and he passed away. It was a very sad time and we cried our eyes out. I remember that right after he died my brother and I tried to watch TV to take our mind off of it. I still can’t even hear the theme from “Love, American Style” without remembering that sad evening.

Skinny died at a later date – a happy, old, skinny hamster. We buried them out in our yard by our sticker bushes like we did with all our animals back then. Someday someone excavating there will find a graveyard of our animal memories.