The Hampster tragedy and Cookie rides a bike!

Well, cookie got to deal with his first tragedy with an animal. One of the reasons I allow my children to have pets is because I believe it is such a great learning experience. I think they learn responsibility and they learn about life, birth and death. I believe it's a lot easier to start talking about death and life after death when a pet dies than when someone close in the family dies. But I digress. Cookie has been putting his hampster (pencil) into crazy cages lately. Whatever containers he can find. The other day I walked into his room and didn't see pencil in it's cage so I asked him where pencil was. He had put pencil into a container without any air and the poor little thing had suffocated. It truly was heartbreaking to see the poor dead little hampster. We went out to the garden and buried it and decided to see if we could find another dwarf hampster at our local pet store. He was lucky. They had two males left. We picked one up and he named it. . . . . pencil. The new pencil is more aggressive and bites cookie sometimes but they are starting to get used to each other and I think he will be a good hampster. He is WAY more nocternal than the old pencil and does some pretty funny things like roll around in the woodchips like a dog.

And now for something completely different. . . Cookie finally figured out how to ride a two wheeled bike on his own yesterday at my family dinner! Everytime he has visited grandma and grandpa's house he works on it and yesterday he just took off! I suggested we could take his training wheels off his bike at home and he informed me he wasn't quite ready for that but at least at gradma's house he'll ride a two wheeler just fine. I'm so proud of my little cookie!

Update: We just got back from getting Cookie from school and he asked me to remove his training wheels. Then proceded to ride around without training wheels all by himself. Now we just need to work on getting him to use the brakes. . .