Bad Luck Birthday Take 2

Last year, we had Curly Jones' second birthday party at our house, just family, nothing crazy.  That day, our air conditioner decided to have an internal fire that destroyed it.  It was about 95 degrees and we had no air conditioning.  $2000 later, we had a new heater and A/C... the heater was only two years old but the new A/Cs run on different coolant and they are connected - the heater couldn't use the new coolant, so we had to replace both.  The same day, my sister arrived for the party and broke her ankle going down the stairs as soon as she arrived.  So I spent a good amount of time with her in the ER, and she spent a good amount of weeks in a cast.  Also that same day, I got the terrible phone call that one of our second graders at school passed away from a heart condition that no one, even her family, knew she had.  That loss stays with all of us at school.

Today we had Curly Jones' third birthday party at our house.  Luckily, no one broke bones.  We did end up with a broken gift, but that's not the end of the world.  CJ also peed on the carpet.  Twice.  Oy.  In the middle of the party, I came upstairs to get something and looked over at Tootsie Roll's hamster's cage.  Oh, no.  Not today.  But yes... sadly.  Hubby and I were upset but we didn't want to tell her in the middle of her sister's birthday party, so we waited until everyone went home.  He hadn't passed away yet, so she did get to hold him and cry and talk to him. He's not going to make it through the night.  Other than goldfish that lived for a day, this is the first pet our 7 yr old has lost... and she still talks about those goldfish.

We have lots of good memories.  Tootsie Roll got his cage last Christmas right before Hubby and I took a 10 yr anniversary trip to Jamaica, and TR was promised that we'd go pick out her new hamster as soon as we got back.  I took her to the pet store, and she fell in love with him immediately.  She told everyone who would listen that it was "love at first sight".  Cookie went through three cages in the short 16 months that we had him.  He chewed through the lock on the first one and escaped twice.  He had some great adventures but we always found him pretty quickly chewing on beach towels in the linen closet.  The second cage was a big, crazy affair with tubes and tunnels and a huge spinning wheel that looked like a ferris wheel.   He liked to fling poop and woodchips a ridiculous distance out of that one, so onto cage #3.  He also had a very cool ball that looked like a princess carriage.  He was very secure in his furry masculinity.Sometimes we would sit in a circle, foot to foot, and let him crawl all around.  Everybody would giggle when he would try to crawl up and over our legs.

We only had Cookie a little over a year but he was part of our family, part of what we think of as "us". We love you, Cookstaroo. We will miss you.