Have you ever stood in the kitchen and worked to untangle a lizard from your nine-year-old’s long hair while trying to remain calm in the face of company?

“It’s fine mom, he likes to hide up in there,” my daughter reassured me as I smiled nervously at my brother-in-law who had stopped in for a visit and consequently was thrust into meeting our daughters’ new pets.

“Uh, ok, but, well, he’s really tangled, I don’t want him to get hurt,” I replied as I tried gently to unwind his little scaly legs from her blonde strands without freaking us both out, the lizard and me, that is.

The rest of the people in the house? Completely unphased, especially my brother-in-law, who, along with my husband, has probably had every creature imaginable live in their childhood home at some point, including a baby skunk, a racoon, a potty-trained rabbit, snakes, birds, rats and a hand-me-down hamster named Boomer.  

Memories of Boomer have come up a lot lately as my youngest, Rosie, made plans to buy a hamster of her own with that $77.50 she earned at her lemonade stand last month. If you thought, like I hoped, that she would move on from that wish, we were all mistaken. If my youngest is anything, it’s relentless and I’m not exaggerating when I say that she has asked me about hamster shopping every day since I put that $77.50 in an envelope. And so, three thousand and forty-six inquiries later, none of us could take it anymore—Rosie was getting her hamster, which meant Edie was getting her lizard which means, along with the cats and the goats and the dogs and the frogs and the horses and the cows and the chickens over the hill, we have also become the caretakers of a rodent and a reptile and the 500 live mealworms living in the fridge.

And, in order to become those caretakers, we had to take a round-trip journey of nearly 400 miles, half of those miles spent anxiously awaiting and the other half spent anxiously hoping that I won’t have to extract an on-the-loose lizard or hamster from the bowels of my SUV. (Although, according to Rosie, a hamster could probably live a pretty good life in our car, you know, with the bounty of crumbs and all.)

“We’re suckers,” my husband whispered to me as he looked over the pet store receipt and I pushed the cart full of bedding and food and enclosure essentials across the parking lot. He had just spent the past twenty minutes interrogating the poor pet shop employee about habitat requirements, temperature regulations and, ‘per ounce to weight of the hamster’ food ratios. To which the employee replied, “we give them a scoop.”

Ok then. A scoop for Popcorn the one-eyed hamster and a pinch of mealworms for the gecko who, upon further research, looks like he will live until Edie’s grandkids have grandkids and then she can experience for herself what it’s like to say, “get the lizard off the kitchen table!”

But I’m not sure she’d mind at this rate. I walked into her room yesterday and the lizard was with her in her bed, just hanging out on her arm as she hunkered down and read a book.

Meanwhile, in Rosie’s room, she’s got Popcorn walking right into her hands when she opens the door of her cage. I’ve never seen a faster bond form between an animal and a human. She feeds that hamster right out her little fingers, piece by piece. I must admit, it’s adorable.

And we are suckers.

But no hamsters in the bed, ok?

Or on the table.

And no more lizards tangled in hair.