Meet the Piggies!

In the latter half of 2009, my friend said :" You don't have a man! You need something to come home to!" And hence we went to Animal Kingdom and came home with Sylbie - a beautiful fluff ball. As the months went past, I put her ever swelling belly down to her normal guinea pig physic and thought nothing of it... until one night I felt a lump on her stomach and freaked out thinking that she has a tumor and is going to die! The next morning, rubbing sleep from my short sighted eyes, I saw a blurry Sylbie with (what looked like) a massive irregular shaped blob on her side - aah! What the hell kind of cancer is this?! I moved closer anxiously, and shockingly, her "tumor" moved away from her! Turns out she gave birth and what I thought was a tumor was probably her poor baby's head that I was squishing and poking. I named her babies Tiramisu and Poe. I originally intended to give them away, but this coincided with the movie G-Force, which made me very skeptical about the only offer I got from a woman with 2 small children - there are no guinea pigs in the world that can do what those things did in G-Force! Hence I decided to keep them (plus they were just too cute!)- luckily both babies were girls and everyone could live happily together.

Sylbie was a wonderful mom

 This was the very first day, Poe was so small and thin and Tiramisu's head was massive on her tiny body...

There is nothing cuter than a baby guinea pig! Araaagharghraahh! (That's me choking on cute overload)

The Piggies:

Sylbie Mandrax Yoruchi Zheng!

My very first guinea pig, and responsible for creating the other two piggies. She has a long name because we had a very messy brainstorm (should she be: cute? Hardcore? Japanese?). She survived a car crash with me, put up with me for the first couple of months when I didn't know better and kept her in a tiny carry cage, and would always run up my baggy bathrobe sleeve when I petted her to hide under my armpit. I even started teaching her tricks (at one point she could kind of do a circle on command!) We drifted apart after the arrival of Poe and Tiramisu, they would cry and got stressed out when I separated them so I let the trio be and Sylbie became skittish and wary of me. She became the most timid of the three, but recently I've been encouraged by signs of her enjoying some back scratching and maybe even being held - the act of being lifted off the ground still scares her though. She's not very vocal, and is a mild mannered sweet piggy.

Poe Splodge!

Poe's like a little Kiss band member! She's quite a butch girl because she's bigger than Tiramisu and most aggressive (also, all that crazy hair). She's the only one prone to biting strangers. She's a bit of a bully, she hogs all the hay and needs her own food bowl because she won't move her fat face to share. She doesn't like climbing the ramp (on the way down she always did this weird thing where she kept on stopping to nibble on her back feet like a dog chasing his own tail). She can be picked up quite easily if she's in a good mood. A very willful little creature who will shove your hand out of the way if she's not in the mood to be petted. 

Tiramisu Boxface!

Everyone's favourite. My boyfriend called her Boxface because that's what her head looked like for the first year or so. She's that smallest out of the trio, most likely because she got sick when she was almost one and I had to feed her Baytril through a syringe. What she lacks in size she makes up for with an adorable, inquisitive, friendly personality streaked with bits of dare devil bravery expressed vibrantly (and often) through her squealing vocalizations. She likes to climb into hammocks and to jump onto boxes (kind of reckless). She's always the first to explore new areas, heading the guinea pig train. 

They are my first piggies, when I got Sylbie from a pet store I didn't know better to first look for a possible shelter from which to adopt. I think adopting rodents is not an idea that occurs to most people, because they are overlooked and deemed inferior/requiring less responsibility than a dog or cat due to their smaller size and shorter lifespan. I am a supporter of animal shelters (our beloved family dog is adopted from the SPCA), and I'm busy getting my act together in order to donate to some of my local shelters as well as potentially volunteer at one. I've also found a guinea pig shelter (Crazy Cavies) in my province! So I'm looking forward to giving back and being more involved with my local guinea pig community.