Slow Days

Sometimes I just need a break. Last week was one of those times. I would have warned you all that I was going to take a hiatus if I had known I was about to need one. Life is occasionally quite impromptu and you know, as in life, so in blogging.

The weekend was exciting. Crazy, gorgeous dump of snow, cancelled birthday parties and then a frantic/worried/bizarre day which we spent huddled over our sweet late-guinea pig Jenny. I never could have imagined that it would be possible to be obsessing worriedly for an entire day over the aliveness or deadness of an animal but that's what happened. They are so very small and she was clearly very sick or else dead....we were rather avidly hopeful. Alas, by this morning I could firmly say she was gone and we said our goodbyes including a custom dirge, Nib wrote and sang "Jenny, come back your friend, you are gone away Jenny, poor, poor Jenny, she did die." and a little postmortem portrait tribute from Dee complete with little stick figure legs poking out of her tiny crayoned body.

This morning after we dropped A off at work the boys and I marched bravely to the pet store after praying for a new friend for our remaining, lonely Sarsparilla. It broke my heart this morning to be greeted by silence instead of the usual friend whistles and tweets and find Sarsparilla moping in her little wooden shelter at one end of the cage. We are the proud new owners of a fluffy black and white piggy and I am pleased to tell you that Sarsparilla appears to have taken her in and is already back to making some of her usual noises. We've named the new little fluff ball Chamomile.

Pom has finally pushed through his two, giant from teeth and is the proud owner of opposing ivories. I heard him gritting them together in that horrible, scraping way all babies experiment with just this morning. Heh. I hope his sleep and irritability improve a bit now that he has put the big chompers behind him for a while. Maybe his body will give him a rest for having started a bit early.

Its slow times at our house. Planning the mythical vegetable garden, roasting beef slow and slower in the oven, drinking vats of milky tea, snuggling the baby and forcing the trimmings from the fruit trees in the yard as I slowly hack away at pruning.

Sarsparilla and Jenny Come To Stay

Pardon the very dirty socks, ya'll.

Snuggling into the soft, warmth of a living animal is a pretty irreplaceable feeling. We tried fish, we tried caterpillars, we tried observing wild animals on occasion and we tried subsisting on visits with pets that friends own. All those things are wonderful and helpful but not quite the same as developing a relationship with a living animal yourself, saying goodnight and good morning to each other, cuddling together on a bad day and learning to observe and understand cross-species communication.

 Our new house residents are a pair of baby sister guinea pigs that the boys named Sarsparilla and Jenny. We found them for free on Craig's List, (source of all good things) and drove home from a small town, a-way up Hwy 15 excitedly making stops in commuter lots and on curbs to peek at them one more time and stop to pick them green twigs and other leafy treats. Ru in particular is pretty beside himself about their arrival but all the boys are very pleased about having our own animal friends and have been very faithful about helping me take care of them. Even Nib is very territorial about his little personal job of filling their food dish with new dried seeds and nuts under my supervision.

They are gentle and silky soft, no finger biting or panicked clawing like rabbits. They are nervous about humans but they have become less skittish over time and are much calmer when people act calmly around them. They now recognize feeding and petting and our other interactions and they will happily sit in arms or laps for fairly indefinite periods of time. They are clever, bright-eyed, social foragers who are most active during the day which makes just watching them lots of fun. They are non-invasive, not smelly, neat and not loud although they do make gentle little squeaking, chirping noises to communicate. They eat raw vegetable and fruit scraps (squishy grapes, carrot tops and apple cores are well-loved), hay in quantity and packaged store grain based food but they get very excited about gifts of grass bouquets trimmed with dandelions eating the flowers and leaves the boys bring them with equal relish. They love to play with green sticks and gnaw rows of little hash marks down  them like miniature beavers keeping their teeth trimmed just so.

Such fun to have a little bright spot like this in our home routine. I have spent some exhausted evenings when the house was finally quiet and I felt spent with one pocket pet snuggled up on my chest, nuzzling that soft fur and looking into those glinting bright eyes just feeling better again. Companionship is so warming, even of the rodent variety. I think A is still not sure he allowed a good thing (I swear to you I got his permission first!) and he has yet to physically touch either one of them and calls them a bit reservedly, with a sniff  "the pigs" but hopefully he'll warm with time. Until then, the boys and I will get in all the snuggles we can....genuine pet-owners at last! I like to think Beatrix Potter would be proud and I think she'd especially approve of their forays into the garden on sunny days We have found that they can be carried outdoors in arms, followed by the boxy, wire section of their home and then put to graze directly onto some warm spot on the lawn, not too far from a good patch of clover. A little garden work seems to make them very happy indeed, life is not so very rough for our girls.

"Guinea Pigs" a watercolor by Beatrix Potter from her collection Cecily Parsley's Nursery Rhymes