The escape artist!

On Monday morning as I was leaving for seminary I noticed the hamster's cage door was open! And of course he was no where inside....he smelled freedom and was gone!! The first thing I thought was "no more after this one!" and then I went in to wake Richard so he could start looking for him. I hadn't grown attached to this little guy like I did Sammy Sr. so I really didn't want to help in the rescue efforts....but I didn't want a dead hamster stinking up my preschool room either!


So Richard gets up and I leave. When I come home an hour later they have located Sammer's hideout. He had crawled into the closet that houses the hot water heater and was digging through the concrete! I couldn't believe a little guy like that could bite through the concrete but he did!

Here is a picture of the hole....kinda hard to see....

a close up of the hole....

When I looked at the hold first it seemed like the rodent had already chewed through a pipe! I started thinking "if this animal could dig through the concrete he would definately be able to chew through a PVC pipe!! how much damage is he doing down there!??!!" and then I started thinking about....shhhhhh..... rat poision. Don't tell the kids.....I told you I wasn't attached! Richard was against that idea and he worked hard to get him out. Monday Richard called me to see if we could vacuum him out. Hmmmmm.....I guess we could try??? Then I came home from my daily errands and the message on the answering maching was from Richard. "Sammers. Oh Sammers. Come out Sammers"....it is so funny how attached he gets to these pets! (It was so funny when he started doing chest compressions on Sammy Sr. after I squished him with the box....don't know if I mentioned that in the post when Sammy died...I just looked through our old posts and I didn't blog about how he died. Well here is the story-readers digest version. He escaped. Was running around Sophia's room. I got the bright idea to trap him in a box when he ran out. Well when I put the box down half of his body was inside the box and the other half out...so....I squished him....right in half. It was a VERY sad morning for the kids and us too. Richard scooped him up and I told the kids to look away! I think I was the only one who did....but when I turned around Richard was doing chest compressions on Sammy! I started laughing!! So anyway...that is the story of Sammy Sr.)

So....back to the story.....Sammers was on the run for 1 day. I did take up his food and water because I didn't want him coming out at night to eat and then going back to his hole and digging to China or whereever! I guess this made Sammers hungry enough because Richard was able to coax him out with some food on Tuesday and get him safely back in his cage!

He is very cute though....and we got him as a baby. The kids(mine and the preschool) love him. He has become tame. I am glad he is back and we didn't have to take drastic measures to protect our pipes!