This week, after much pressure from my five-year-old daughter, I feel obliged to dedicate this column to Fluffy. Fluffy is my daughter’s class hamster. Our family has spent much time over the past five weeks talking of little else. We have discussed what she eats, what she likes to play with and how she is feeling each day.
As a parent, I have a lot to thank Fluffy for. My daughter has never had such a happier term at school. We only have to mention Fluffy’s name at breakfast, and a smile breaks out across her face. Her ‘hamster’ vocabulary has been impressively enhanced and her spellings of words such as “saw-dust,” “gnaw” and “rodent” are near perfect.
When she gets into the car after school, I ask, “How was school?” The response used to be something along the lines of, “Alice has crisps in her lunchbox. Can I have crisps tomorrow?” Now, when I ask, more often than not, the response is, “Fluffy wasn’t very keen on playing on her wheel today.” In fact, I gather each day the children sit down for “Fluffy circle time” when they have the opportunity to look closely at Fluffy and chat about her. They have learnt to recognise when she is tired, be considerate to her and to be gentle. She also has a role to play in science lessons and was most recently placed next to a teddy bear, to demonstrate things that are dead or alive. Fluffy also needs plenty of toys, and quite apart from her very own hamster motorbike, she also relies on the children to bring in loo paper rolls. My daughter has taken this very seriously and I have found mounds of loo paper lying on the floor, which she has unravelled from around the cardboard.
As most of us know, hamsters are not blessed with a long and fruitful life. I asked my daughter’s teacher about this and how the children might cope with Fluffy disappearing over night. To my relief, the class teaching assistant also has a hamster called Mr Darcy who looks identical to Fluffy, and apparently he is willing to move into Fluffy’s cage at short notice if necessary.
Thanks to Fluffy, I am no longer under constant pressure to get a hamster, guinea pig or rabbit, something I have resisted for years on the grounds that border terrorists and small pets such as these do not gel well. Our knowledge of hamsters is now extensive but I am delighted that Fluffy (or Mr Darcy!) is confined to a corner of the school classroom and according to my daughter is a very important 22nd member of Year 1.
