Doomed

Lately, my texts with Daisy have looked a little bit like this:

She’s also been leaving photos on my phone like so:

And sitting near me and subtlety stretching while she has a chinchilla on her screen:

I made the mistake of showing her a chinchilla reel, and as much as I love chinchillas (oh my goodness they are so soft and cute!!!), we can’t have one. We are not good pet people. We don’t have the energy or diligence to take care of animals.

I’ve had a lot of pets throughout my life - innumerable cats, several dogs, and birds, including parakeets, chickens, ducks, turkeys, and a jerk-faced parrot named Pete. I’ve had bunnies, fish, and even pigs. We also went through our fair share of hamsters (which my sister and I snuck to church in our scripture cases), and for a while, we had a family rat named Buddy, but I put him out on the deck with no water while I mopped the kitchen floor one day, and he cooked in the sun. When my siblings and I found him, he was stiff as a board with his legs splayed out in such a way that we struggled to get his body through the cage door for burial.

In my married life, our pets have included the aforementioned jerk-faced parrot, one cat, one duck, two parakeets, four bunnies (two of which I think I might have killed in similar fashion to Buddy the rat), and a dozen or so chickens. 

Scotty and I decided that after our final three chickens die, we would no longer have chickens. We love them, but like I said, we are not good pet owners. But then there was that whole COVID thing, and our chickens gave us eggs when there were no eggs to be found, and I realized what a blessing it was to have chickens. And then Scotty went to Mexico, and I accidentally bought three baby chicks, so now we still have the “final three” chickens plus three new ones. So maybe I’ll continue getting my “cute pet” fix through baby chickens every few years, but I can’t let a chinchilla into the mix. 

I mean… look at what I did to Buddy and the bunnies! A chinchilla in the care of this family is surely doomed. 

So cute! So fluffy!

But so very doomed!

So no, Daisy. I will not let you get a chinchilla. Because you live with me, and I have a track record.