Kitty and Sugar

Saturday night, I babysat a little girl named Kitty. I used to babysit her every week, a couple of years ago, but then they stopped calling. I later found out that her parents had split up, and this last Saturday was the first time I'd seen her since. She's certainly grown, in the year and a half or so since I stopped seeing her; she's gone from tiny tot to first grader. And she's matured, too. We'd left off in the middle of her "let's test people" phase (a phase to which teens, in my opinion, should be exposed to as birth control), and is now quite pleasant. All in all, it went well; we checked out her treehouse, did some flashcards, and read some Robin Hood stories, at which point she went to bed.

But.

She has a hamster. A hamster named Sugar. I'm sure Sugar is very sweet, and she's definitely the most lithe hamster I've ever met, but she is the loudest hamster ever. She lives in a little Habitrail cage, and she seemed to be staging a Shawshank Redemption escape. She just sat in one of the little plastic boxes, and scraped at it with her teeth. I'm not going to lie, there were plastic shavings flying; she was making progress. But my god, the noise! It was the hamster version of nails on a chalkboard, without the hamster-sized volume. For three hours straight. Never again will I used hamsters as examples of short attention spans.

But at least Kitty was cool.

Bloody hamster.