Horrible Monday.

I am posting this a few days late...

Several weeks ago I had a mouse in my room, so I got a mouse trap put in my room by my desk. It was a “glue trap,” so they get stuck on it and then can’t get off and eventually die….well, the mouse never came around, and I forgot about the trap and never threw it away.

Monday morning I got to school and the papers that were on the counter were strewn about on the floor. We have a class pet. She is a gerbil named Skittles. When I saw the papers, I suspected her because they are right by her cage. I looked in and she was not there. She has gotten out once before because a student didn’t leave the door securely closed. That time she was sitting in the middle of the floor looking at me all cute, and I was able to catch her in a box and put her back. This time I looked frantically around the room…then I remembered that rat trap…I walked over and screamed. There she was, the class pet, stuck to the glue. It was pitifully sad. I did not have enough time to “dispose of it” before I had to get my kids, and I did NOT want to be the one to do it anyway. I went and told Mr. Ed (the one and only man at our school--he's a parent volunteer), and he said he would come back when I had dropped my kids at PE in 15 minutes. I had to spend 15 minutes with the kids in the room and Skittles on the trap. I was petrified that one of them would look and find her, but they did not. After I dropped them off at PE, I came back to the class, and Mr. Ed pulled the mouse trap out from under the desk. When he did, he saw that Skittles was still barely alive. Barely hanging on. We thought seriously about trying to pry her lose somehow, but were pretty sure it was a lost cause. She had even gnawed through a part of her tail to get lose, but her entire back was still stuck to the glue trap. We then decided that somehow we had to put her out of her misery because it was so sad. She was making little screeching noises. ...And this is the part of the story that I walked out of the room for….Mr. Ed put Skittles inside of a plastic bag and used a hammer to “put her out of her misery.” I left the room and Mr. Ed did his job and then took Skittles out.

When I picked my students up, I told my them that I had found Skittles ‘passed away’ when I got to school this morning. They assumed she died in her cage. There is no way they need to know otherwise. Too gruesome. I hid the cage so they would not find the huge hole that Skittles gnawed in the plastic to get out of her cage. There was even ‘saw dust’ on the counter around the hole that she had made. Craziness.

All that to say, it was not a good morning.

RIP Skittles. 46 sixth graders miss you very much.