This is going to be a very sad post, maybe THE saddest post of my blog’s life! When I was a little girl I had three kinds of pets. The first two were Beta fish, each died somehow, both were blue, both were named J.R. after the character on Dallas.
The next pets were hamsters. I really liked my hamsters but something always happenned to them. The first one got loose and walked into a heating unit thing in the bathroom, I heard the sizzle as his little paws burned off and reached in the heater thing to pull him out (he was stuck). His paws were singed and charcoal black and I was crying/running to my mom who got very upset. We put him in his cage and we went to the vet hospital in Manhattan. After waiting our turn and the doctor taking Pebbles away, my next memory is of the Dr. whispering to my mother and my mother being very adamant about something. I later understood from her conversations with other people that the doctor had tried to convince her to let Pebbles die but she’d insisted that the $35 (early 80’s money/single mother) was not a problem. We cared for Pebbles, putting his ointment on every few days. Eventually the burned parts came off and he had nubs. It didn’t seem to bother him much as he hobbled around.
He died a natural death a while later so we got another hamster. The name again was Pebbles, we didn’t have this one long. My babysitter who was like a grandma to me, made a lovely pillow for Pebbles II to sleep on. Well, one morning I looked in the cage to see Pebbles II’s head stuck in the pillow. The pillow was stuffed with string and yarn and somehow Pebbles suffocated or strangled herself. 
My next pet was a calico cat and that was my one ray of happiness for quite a while. Her name was Noel and she came out of nowhere on one of the worst days of my life I came home to my room to see a box on my bed with a big red ribbon. When I opened it, there she was, a little calico kitten. The first few months she would sleep under the sheets with me which I loved! She would come running to greet me when I came home from school purring and licking my hands. She stayed with us for a very long time, she was always an indoor/outdoor cat, then one day she never came home. We looked for her, did the posters, etc… but no leads ever turned up.
There is one more pet that I haven’t mentioned, Fofinha, the red dobermann pinscher but I’ve got to save something for a happy pet post some day! I’m sure the iDog from Burger King would be a lot less trouble then all these real pets. Big thanks go out to PBN for organizing and BK for providing the opportunity to reminisce.
“This post was written for Parent Bloggers Network as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by Burger King Corp.”
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