It rarely happens that I write two posts within one day, but I'm by myself tonight and I just feel like writing. So I've decided to write about our guinea-pigs. There is a longer story to it.
In January 2009, I got a hamster that was already one year old at the time. I named her Lucy and Lucy died of old age in summer 2010. Two and a half years is a pretty good age for a hamster. However, after her death the flat seemed empty to my boyfriend and me and we decided to get pets again - rodents since dogs are often not allowed in flats and we wouldn't have enough time for one right now since they do need to be taken for walks frequently. A cat was out of question. In autumn, someone from our swordfencing group told us about someone else who had to get rid of their nine month-old gerbils. They were ready to give them away with a huge cage, for free. That's how we ended up with our gerbils Monty and Reepicheep.
Around Christmas we decided that we wanted guinea-pigs as well and in January I found a breeder over the internet who wanted to give his baby guinea-pigs away. He assured us that all three of them were boys so we believed him and took them home where my boyfriend had built a cage for them. We named them Patch, Sparky and Basil. They were five weeks old when we got them. Soon we noticed that Basil and Sparky were fighting over Patch so we had to separate Basil from the other two since he was the most aggressive of them. For weeks, we were all living in peace. One day in march we weighed the guinea-pigs - something we do every week. Patch had gained a surprisingly large amount of weight and two days later my boyfriend joked that she might be pregnant. As the anxious person I often am, I researched pregnant guinea-pigs on the internet and saw photos of pregnant sows which look too much like our Patch. That's when we realised that Patch was actually a girl - and pregnant.
That day my boyfriend and I were sitting on our settee, watching our little aubergine-shaped guinea-pig, both of us groaning: "I want a drink!" and wondering about how many babies she might be carrying inside her belly. The following weeks were tense. I did more research on the internet and began to worry about all kinds of things - that the babies might be disfigured since Patch and Sparky are siblings, that Patch might be too young for a pregnancy, that we would wake up one morning to find a bloody mess of dead little guinea-pigs in the cage. Often I would tell my boyfriend about things I read and that I was worried about. He got a little annoyed at some point. I really did worry too much. During that time we had Sparky neutered even though we were not entirely sure if it was him or Basil who had impregnated Patch. Basil was neutered a few weeks later.
Patch was growing bigger and bigger. We could even see the babies moving inside her which was amazing. On April 14th, which is my mother's birthday, I woke up at around seven in the morning and walked into our sitting room. Patch was sitting in her cage, looking at me with her innocent eyes. She was slim, very slim compared to what she had looked like the night before! I stormed back into the bedroom and woke up my boyfriend who lifted the wooden little house he had made for them. And there they were: two completely white, tiny guinea-pigs and a completely dark one sitting between them, huddled up together, their fur still looking slightly damp. There was just a little bit of blood on a cloth, but althogether, things were looking very clean.
Two days later, we weighed the babies for the first time. We never took them out without Patch so they would not get too scared. Each was less than 100 g. The little dark one had two white spots on her nose and so we named it Spotty. The other two were completely white so it was clear that Sparky was their father. He is also completely white. They were so adorable, so tiny, but already fully developed with fur and their eyes open. On the second day, they began to carefully step out for a few moments and on the third day, we could observe them while they were exploring the cage and beginning to eat tiny bits of hay. It was a miracle.
We had decided to give them away once they would be old enough and when they were about three weeks old we put an ad on the internet, but nobody replied to say they wanted to take them. We had to separate them from their mother at the time since she was getting too thin from nursing them and we were growing more and more attached to them. The dark one we named Spotty, the white female we named cotton since her fur is slightly longer and the little white male is Mr. You. By June we knew we would keep them and in the first week of July, we had Mr. You neutered as well to disable the potential guinea-pig factory.
The babies are about four months old now. They have grown quite a bit and we laugh a lot about them. They are very tame, very cheeky and absolutely adorable - as are the adults, by the way. I don't think we could ever give them away. Watching them grow and develop is amazing and we have become very attached to them. There was a time, when Patch was still pregnant with them, when I feared things might spiral out of control, that we would have more and more baby guinea-pigs and that we would get completley overwhelmed with them. However, things are fine. The babies are growing and they make our life a little happier every day. Having pets is a wonderful thing. We laugh more, we have happy moments with them and life is a little more interesting with our zoo!
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