Little Miss Guinea Rockstar

Oh look, isn’t she cute with the school Guinea Pig cage-laying, and broccoli-carrot-dry food “salad” preparation…

(Guinea and JD are kinda in cahoots, we think – he knocks over his pellets every time he’s dining alfresco on the Miss’ Ikea step stool (also highly recommended – super sturdy, lotsa uses all over the home and the one we’ve got has been good quality – hardier than an Indigo Living one I bought on sale sometime back, so really good value for money!) and we tire of picking up every single one so JD gets a treat…)

For real though, the Miss does deserve a lot of credit for increasing Guinea Pig Responsibility, over the last few visits. She’s been there at every bedding change and even asked to be taught how to pick up his poop with tissue (we drew the line at letting her mop up the increasingly large (Guinea’s growing! So’s his bladder!) puddles of pee around the home though 😛 Maybe next time…)

Bedding – check! Carefully mixed and transferred into feeding bowl (I’m not kidding) meal – check! Chewing block – check! “Pree-tee” dried flowers saved from the pile of hay and squirrelled away in her “purse-ey” – check!

Guinea often climbs in by himself, this school pet is really quite sweet, and the Miss must’ve fallen in love with him from how he is at school… Even super-serious Rockstar is not as “dedicated,” observing in between Youtubes that we “already have a dog…” So in the end Guinea’s been an incredible learning opportunity for the Miss, and parenting opportunity for us, I think he mellowed her out a bit because otherwise she’d be even more boisterous than she is…

The Miss washed his head pretty gently too… Don’t tell Rockstar, because he’s going to complain she’s super rough with him and take that all personal… (Actually it’s quite true, she’s pretty rough with Rockstar. Then again she’s pretty rough with all of us in the family, but now come to think of it JD doesn’t get it either, only the humans :D)

And here she is, pushing the newly-bathed Guinea around for a joyride on her chair before bundling him off for a blow-dry (was quite worried he’d get run over so didn’t let her do that for very long) 😀

Epilogue: The first night Guinea came to stay, the Miss cried like her heart would break, at bedtime. It was gut-wrenching. As I struggled to soothe her, I remember being really worried if I’d made a huge mistake in bringing him home.

By now he’s come over quite a few times because we also wait around for if someone else pulls out… When I looked at the thick Guinea Pig Home Visit Log that will run out of pages soon, I realised repeat visits aren’t uncommon. One entry mentioned it was the third time he’d been to another little girl’s house, and that she “wasn’t afraid” of him anymore.

Each time we drop him back in school, the Miss has taken the goodbye better and better. Like Guinea and his puddles, I like to think she’s grown 🙂