This past Friday, Steve and I went over to our friends house for dinner and enjoyed a few hours worth of good food, laughter, story-telling and general conversation with some of our favorite people in the world.  Eventually, as nothing lasts forever, we had to head home.

We pulled into our driveway and were doing the general end of night chit-chat: “I’m sleepy”, “Sammy needs to go out”, etc. as we headed up the walk to the door.  I was in front so I saw it first.

Now, to be clear, I wasn’t quite sure what “it” was because I stopped dead in my tracks and just stared.  But I was fairly certain that the long, skinny, furless tail curled around the small white ball of fur meant it was some form of rodent.  Whether that type of rodent was mouse (ew!), rat (EW!) or baby possum (HOLY ‘EFFIN EW!) was yet to be determined as all I did was stand there and point in it’s general direction while looking at Steve.

(I’d be really, really effective in a crisis situation!  Bear comes walking around a corner.  Kristy sees it first and stands and points.  Gets eaten by the bear before Steve even realizes what she’s pointing at.)

(Also, this moment was a quintessential depiction of one of mine and Steve’s favorite stand-up bits by Bill Burr where he explains in the simplest, funniest terms that men get paid more an hour because of the role they need to play in a crisis situation.  You should give it a watch here and check out anything else by him because he’s hysterical!

As I was saying, I’m standing there like an idiot mute pointing at this tiny ball of white fur (with skeevy long tail! ugh!) while Steve goes over to investigate (YEA HONEY, IT’S A RODENT! AHHH, IT BIT ME! I HAVE RABIES! …. LOL).  Of course, I can now follow because Steve is in front of me and he’s a boy and bigger than me and will protect me from whatever threat this ping-ponged size ball thing was posing.

(Gender stereotype enforcer right over here baby!!!)

As I guessed, it’s a rat.  And Steve is crouching in front of it, checking it out, determining its intentions or reasoning or just generally getting all 12-year-old boy and being like “COOL!!”.   I start to feel bad for the poor thing at this point because it’s huddled in a tiny ball in the corner right near my front door and looks terrified.  Not like bite you, defensive terrified, but cold and hungry and just generally exhausted.  It even allowed Steve to pet it briefly.

We both were pretty sure it wasn’t wild because it was all white with red eyes, which indicated it was an albino rat.  While white rats are uncommon wild, we were pretty certain albino rats are rare, used more for feeder, lab or pets.

We go into the house, taking precaution to scoot in quickly so as to not let the rat in and not let Sammy out.  This has become a situation of sorts and Steve decides it’s hungry, so he grabs some bread from the refrigerator and heads back outside.  I follow.

He breaks the bread into pieces and drops it on the ground and the rat turns around at the noise but doesn’t eat the bread, just continues to sit in a shivering ball.  We discuss whether it’s blind, where we think it came from, what were we going to do with it.

Call us bleeding hearts but the poor thing was cute and scared and this tiny ball of fur (except the tail.  I couldn’t think about the tail) so we decided to get it inside and figure out what to do with it from there. (Also, we have a neighborhood cat that hangs out everywhere – including under OUR cars, on OUR porch, THANKS KITTY – so we’re pretty sure if we left him out, he would become Marshall’s dinner)

NOTE: We are insane!

I had one rule and that was we couldn’t keep him IN the house.  The garage was ok because I pretty much ignore the fact that I’m sure there are other creepy crawlers in there.  But inside was a no-no.  Partly because what if, god forbid, he escaped and, even more god forbid, Sammy got a hold of him.  Then I’d live in creeped out fear of waking up to a rat crawling on me in bed or finding it dead somewhere in the house, preferably not underneath Sammy’s grinning, panting, excited jowls!  (Because that’s my job, MAMA! TO PROTECT YOU FROM THE RODENT SCUM!)

Steve searches high and low in the garage for something that could contain the thing, which was infinitely harder than you’d imagine as it couldn’t be cardboard (chew through), couldn’t have holes in the sides (climb up) and needed to be deep enough to keep it from climbing out.  We settled on an old plastic garbage can.

Steve put on a pair of work gloves and I put a towel at the bottom of the can and we went out to commence Operation: Rat Catcher which really wasn’t all that hard since it involved Steve scooping the little guy up and depositing him in the can and me walking into the house towards the garage with it held like four feet in front of me and Sammy trailing my heels.

(WHAT?! It’s cute one minute, creepy the next, then cute again! I’M A GIRL WHEN I WANNA BE!)

The next day, Steve had to go to work so I got to rat-sit.  I leaped out of bed at 7 when I heard Steve going in to check on it (curiosity killed the cat, eh?) and found him in there staring into garbage can.  When I peeked inside, the poor thing was devouring a baby carrot.  Steve tells me it’s my responsibility to check on him throughout the day and he would go to PetSmart on the way home and see about getting him a habitat or some better accommodations than a garbage can.

So YAY for that!

But it wasn’t a big deal.  I eventually took the poor thing out of the tiny garbage can and put him into a much wider storage bin with more towels (wearing gloves as we were both being extra cautious handling him – washing hands when we petted, wearing gloves to move him).  I gave him a few bits of dog food and another carrot and even put a toiler paper roll for it to chew and a brown lunch bag for it to hide in.  I would check on it every few hours.

I wasn’t getting attached by any means, I just wanted it to be comfortable, per se!

Eventually, I got a bit perturbed as the day wore on and the thing got curious and restless.  It would let us pet it but it nibbled, like a tasting nibble, on everything, including us.  It also started trying to jump out of the bin.  I caught it standing on the lunch bag to get height and then trying to jump to the other side of edge of the bin.  At that point, I put the lid on enough to keep it from getting out but still allowing it to breathe and waited until Steve got home.

He arrived with a hamster starter kit and we set up shop for the little guy.  He LOVED it!  In no time, he had the bedding and the paper towels we used to line the cage all set up as a little nest.  He had a little area where he ate his food.  He was climbing all over the inside of the cage like he was Spiderman.

Now we had to figure out what to do with him.  As the day had passed, I was fairly certain I didn’t want to keep him.  For the reasons listed above and the fact we already have Sammy and the bearded dragon.  And the fact that anytime Sammy was near the cage, he was FREAKING THE ‘EFF OUT, whining, trying to chomp at the bars, sniffing the rat.  Plus, it was a rat and while some think they are cute and cuddly, I found him only cute and slightly tolerable as long as he was in his cage.

I think Steve kind of wanted to keep him because he had talked about having a rat before.  From what I read, they are clean, curious animals and make good pets.  And Steve never had the novelty of gerbils or hamsters like I did so it was cute seeing him watch the rat in the cage and saying “Get in the wheel! Get in the wheel! Do it! Do it!” because he wanted to see him run in the wheel.  But I think ultimately, we both realized it wasn’t a good idea to keep him.

But we didn’t know how to get rid of him.  Steve was fairly certain he came from our neighbors across the street because he had seen a reptile light on in their house and was pretty sure this little was supposed to be or had been, at one point, food.  And we knew that ultimately, that’s what he probably was – food.  So we didn’t want to drop him on Craigslist because people would scoop him up for dinner for one of their reptiles.  We didn’t think the SPCA would take him or value his life enough to keep him and find a home.  And we didn’t know too many people who would want a rat as a pet.

But we knew ONE!  And that was all it took.  One of the girls in our group, as it turns out, had always wanted a pet rat and as soon as another friend passed along the word that we were looking to get rid of one, she jumped on the chance.

They came over to pick him up last night.  He acquainted himself by nipping at them (or biting, whatever you want to call it!) and she left with a new pet.  And now we can at least feel better about rescuing the poor guy and making sure he lives and long and happy life somewhere other than in a snake’s stomach.

So again, we are insane but I feel much better knowing we did what we could without having to keep him.  And that we did it so quickly, because any longer, and we would have had a new pet – by the name of Snowball.  That’s what Steve had named him!

Thank god for friends!!!!