Moderate chaos!!

There was a moderate amount of chaos at ours around midnight on Saturday.  The Lovely Melanie was in Hatfield for the night, and I was in charge, so it never got above “moderate”.  I hate to think what would have happened otherwise.

Around midnight I heard Millie get upset about something in her room.  When I walked in she was apparently frightened by something that “ran across the floor,” and – more alarmingly – she could “see the eyes!”

Rat? Large spider? Snake? Ghost???  WTF??

I sat down on the bed and gave her a hug before happening to glance at the cage of Sparkle the gerbil.

The top hatch was open and Sparkle wasn’t visible.

That’s because Sparkle was ON THE LOOSE!!

ON THE LOOSE!!!!!!

Somebody – mentioning no names *cough*Millie*cough* – had left the hatch open and Sparkle had, quite naturally, climbed out and gone for a look around.

Gerbils are fast, agile and can jump like you wouldn’t believe – not to mention being small and able to squeeze into all sorts of tiny spaces; I thought we’d probably seen the last of Sparkle (until one day when a tiny gerbil corpse would turn up behind a wardrobe…)

But no, she popped out from under Millie’s wardrobe and looked curiously up at us, unaware of the consternation her freedom was causing.

After a second’s pause I dived towards her, and for the next five minutes moderate chaos reigned as I chased her around Millie’s bedroom – holding my breath every time she disappeared under some furniture.

At one point Amber popped a sleepy head round the door to see what on earth was going on.

“Sparkle’s escaped!” shouted Millie.

“Oh,” said Amber, and wandered back to bed.

I managed to catch the wayward Sparkle under a bucket at one point – a false start because I still couldn’t get her back in the cage.  Luckily, at no point did she think of hiding and staying hidden, and eventually a two-handed grab nailed her and we returned her safely to the cage.

We all laughed about it the next morning, but Millie was genuinely upset last night: scared that the same thing would happen again, so a saucepan lid has been placed over the cage door.  Just in case.