WHERE IS THE RAT?!?

My daughters are having a garage sale today.  They’ve been working it all by themselves (along with their older friend), and it’s fun to peek out the window and watch them.  They’ve gotten a lot of customers, and people are buying our old junk and popsicles and some have even donated money just because the kids are so cute.  It kept them busy all morning, and things were going great until they went upstairs to get their bathing suits on because they were hot.  That’s when they noticed that one of our four pet rats was not in his cage!  Where do you even begin to look for a missing rat in a house?!?

Not only that, but one of our dogs is a terrier mix and has been yearning to taste a pet rat.  We needed to find that rat before the dog did!  My oldest daughter is a worrier, so of course she started panicking about her rat – near hyperventilation and everything.  I started to look for the rat, but then worse-case scenarios started running through my head – what if it got outside and we never found it?  What if it was dead somewhere?  What if the kids found it dead?  What if no one found it dead and it stank up the house for weeks?  What if we couldn’t find it and it starved?  I went to look under my bed (funny that I thought I saw something running across the floor this morning.  I chalked it up to a hallucination caused by lack of sleep which happens to me a lot – I sometimes see my cat running across the floor, and she died over a year ago!), but then I realized that I wouldn’t really WANT to find the rat under there.  I’m not scared of rats in the slightest, but today I was not in the mood to look under my bed and have a rodent come running at me.  As I was debating what to do next, my daughter found the missing rat (Bobby Jack) in her sock drawer.  Apparently the sock drawer was a “safe place” for Bobby since the girls have been putting him in there (!), and he likes it.  Nevermind their poor, unsuspecting laundry maid who has rats running all over her work, sigh.

But the good news is the rat is safe and sound.  Now we have to figure out how that happened in the first place.  My two-year-old admitted to letting the rat out, but my husband thinks she is giving a false confession because she is usually scared to pick up the rats.  Hopefully someone let him out and forgot about him and he didn’t get out on his own.  I  am just thankful we locateed the MIA rat before the dog did!