Saphira...."The Rat"

My daughter's pet rat, Saphira, died last week and we tried to bury it today. Since the ground has been frozen here for the past 2 months, we did not succeed. So Saphira is back in cold storage until the spring thaw. Saphira came to this family from my daughter's 4th grade class, almost 2 years ago. She was a class experiment and after a weak moment, I let her volunteer to bring it home for a weekend. Well she brought it home toward the beginning of the experiment, when it was still very little and cute. Everyone, well almost everyone, everyone but Hubby thought the rat was pretty neat and I gave permission for Brandi to tell her teacher we could adopt it when the class was done with it. Let me clarify right now the experiment was seeing what would happen when the rat ate junk food, it was not harmed in any way. So a few weeks later we were the proud owner of "The Rat", so we went out to get a cage. We bought a cage at the pet store, and when we bought the cage, the pet store was running a special that when you bought a cage you got a free hamster. which is how we got George. (George is Monty's hamster, and is a whole another story). So we now have 2 cages (needed to get another cage for the FREE hamster, since it could not co habitat with "The Rat"), one hamster, and a rat. Well when we went to go pick up the rat, it was not small and cute any more, it was triple the size and had a long tail...UGH. But Brandi loved this rat and as long as she kept it in her room we lived happily. Saphira was entered in the County Fair as a small animal 4H project and won Champion in the rat division and Reserve Grand Champion over all the small animals (which includes birds, snakes, turtles, lizards, hamsters, gerbils, and I think there was even a hedge hog there that night). So now Saphira is a star in the house, she had all these big purple puffy ribbons adorning her cage and my daughter was in heaven. I still referred to her as "The Rat". We were told when we adopted Saphira, she would only live about 2 years, and we had her about 22 months. My daughter was heart broken last week when she came home and found her curled up in the bottom of the cage. She painted a shoe box, for her to be buried in and lined it with material. Our only problem was how were we going to bury it in the middle of December in Chicago. So Saphira has been waiting for burial, and we thought it might have been warm enough today. So we pack up Saphira, a shovel, a little cross made out of wood that we were going to spray paint pink, a medium size rock, (also painted pink), and a bunch of silk flowers into the van and drove 24 miles out to the barn where Shali, the horse she rides, lives. We figured we would bury it out there, because we might be moving in a couple of years and Shali's owners are there to stay. But needless to say, we couldn't budge any dirt, so no hole was dug and Saphira came back home with us. I am thinking "The Rat" will be with us for a few more months, and we will try again. So this is Saphira's legacy...or as I have always called her "The Rat".
R.I.P. Saphira!