give the gerbils a box

And don't expect to get it back. The gerbils can completely dismantle and dismember a box in less than half a day. Put the box in and they sniff around, climbing into it and scratching around. Until they realise that they can bite it. And they chomp crazily.

Like this:

Chomp...          Chomp...          and Chomp...

After that Gerby laps up the water crazily. It must be really tiring chomping all that cardboard.

the babies

This is a post dedicated to our two babies, Salt and Pepper. They are very grown up now! In fact, as of today, they are 3 weeks old!

Hello, Salt! Looking for something?

Salt wanders out of her house...

...and inspects around.

Meanwhile, Pepper is already outside. He looks in the corner.

And presses his nose against the plastic tank. Looking for something, Pepper?

Aha he found it. The chew stick! Which was not in the corner.

We are proud to say that Pepper is able to stand up without falling backwards! Salt falls backwards, but hope she learns. And pepper, being the ever lovable hamster, lets you pick him up, and will even crawl onto mummy's hand!

Sleepy post

It's been some time since the last update. Why? Because our hamsters and gerbils have all been sleeping. Don't believe us?

Fatty lying outside her house, on her back. She's such a baby. Look how soundly she's sleeping!


Fatty, this time by the food dish. She loves sleeping on her back, though not all the time.


Gerby lies on her side below the wheel.


Told you our hamsters and gerbils were all sleeping.

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All in the Family

alright, so this is my first post! as mummy to the (now) NINE munchkins! it's crazy looking after so many of them, and they have all kinds of different habits too!

right now, most of the attention goes to salt and pepper, the 2 babies.. pepper still cant poo by herself so needs a little help a couple of times a day..

as for the rest, they just get a little handling twice a day, ball time (to run around in their exercise balls) every evening, and feeding twice a day.. sounds quick but it really takes quite a lot of time!

their feeding habits are as such now:

Cookie: Marukan nut mix (twice daily)
Cotton: Marukan nut mix (twice daily)
Creamy: Marukan nut mix (morning), Gex pellets (evening)
[special arrangements as we are still trying to help her gain weight after giving birth, without engorging her cheek pouches]
Butter: Organic mix (twice daily)
Fatty: Gex pellets (twice daily)
Herby & Gerby: Hamster Delight (twice daily)
Salt & Pepper: Fresh salad (morning), Organic Mix (evening)
[nb. fresh salad prepared by mommy, consists of grated carrots and broccoli mostly, sometimes other vege]

look out for more updates about day to day life!

(i'm a stickler for routines while ben does the exciting events and stuff!)

salt and pepper

Cream gave birth, the morning of two wednesdays ago (the first of April). Nope, it's not a joke! The babies are already twelve days old =)

escaped

Yesterday, Fatty flumoxed us into frantically flipping and flapping feverishly around the living room.

She escaped, sometime in the morning, but we did not realise till the evening. We hereby conclude that she has the ability to:

(1) push open the ajar cage door

(2) fall great heights without crying

(3) climb agily up to the top of her cage

What a crazy baby.

We found her, after the loss of 6 pellets from her food dish placed in the middle of the living room confirmed that she was indeed still in the house. A few minutes later, we got her as she was trying to run away. The sneaky girl!

Who is safe in her cage and running like nothing happened.

cutie!

No words need to be said. Just some cute photos of fatty! =)

cookie and cream

In case any of you have been wondering, what happened to cookie? And her pregnancy?

Let's get some facts right. Cookie was not pregnant. She was just...fat. And to think that I smsed Aunty Cora everyday to check on Cookie and whether she had popped. But nothing to pop, never pop.

And in fact, just two days ago, Cream gave birth.

In the middle of the night, to three (number pending verification) healthy pups!

We can see one of them here:

This pink thing which moves and squeals. Yes, it squeals a high pitched squeal, which is often heard when they accidentally come unlatched from feeding position. And they only grow silent when Cream painstakingly gathers them all and cleans them. Don't you think she's awesome?

We don't have many pregnant photos, as we only realised Cream was pregnant 2 days before she gave birth. And we are not lousy hamster owners, just that we had been observing her grow to Cookie's size, and we thought she was fat, until we took a photo of her:

I think it's quite obvious that her neck is rather skinny till her shoulders, before she sort of pears out into a pear shape. Nice tummy there, Cream!

Meanwhile, what of poor Cookie? Cream turned aggressive just one day before she gave birth, and we had to move poor Cookie into a spare plastic tank which we had:

Cookie, in her small tank, scouting her cardboard box and carboard tube and new red bottle. (Note: not all in picture)

Anyway, she fell asleep soon enough in what I call, the pokeball position. I choose you, COOKIE-MON!

fatty update

Poor fatty, having such a name.

But, she's our first Syrian hamster. Syrians are a cool breed; they live best alone. The pet shop people kept two syrians together but they were only 5 weeks old. At the 6th week, they will have to be separated, so we did not feel very xin tong when separating Fatty from her black mottled sibling.

In fact, we bought Fatty just 5 minutes before the shop closed.

And boy, did she give us trouble. Not the same kind of trouble like a biting Cotton or a scrambling Cookie-Cream pair or a pair of robos who think they can fly. But a really bad stinky trouble.

Now she's stabilised though, after we stabilised her food (pellets, not the best, but what we bought for her so she has no choice but to eat it) and drink (probiotics water to rid her body of the smell. We use the same dose, I realise as cotton gets, but he's so much smaller! Wonder if we increasing the dose would help?)

And she does not stink as much. Latest update is that she stands up and responds to her name being called. Clever Fatty!

a day in the life of a gerbil

The gerbils' tank keeps changing, like a couple of renovators permanently digging and landscaping around.

From left to right: the gerbil's filled-up wooden house, the secret underground passage, more of the secret underground passage, the secret burrow.

With Herby and Gerby sleeping soundly. Actually, Herby seems to have been woken up by us!

Gerby stirs too, and they move through their secret passage.

They move, exploring their secret network of tunnels in the dark.

Herby sniffs the soil. "Gerby," he asks, "have you been digging around recently?"

Apparently she has. Herby discovers a tunnel leading to the back of the tank.

He stretches his head in to scout the tunnel.

Meanwhile Gerby squeezes through the tunnel to the surface.

Watch her head pop out from the hole in the ground!

At the surface, Gerby tries to hide from the camera.

She explores the food dish. "Grr, no food. Tricked again" she frowns.

Oops, Gerby is caught on film!

Curiously, she goes up close, and looks out of the tank.

OH NO IT'S THEM! I don't want to go out please mummy please please. *darts away*

After a long time of coaxing and spooking, we finally managed to get the gerbils out for their playtime =)

the burrow

Herby and Gerby have extended their underground network to include an entire basement 2 made out of soil. Seems like they have gotten the better of us, being able to hide where we cannot reach or see them. And we have no choice but to feed them and watch them come out of their burrow to get their food and run back to eat it.

BAD HABITS Gherby!

Next two weeks, if they still refuse to show face or give us face, NO FOOD for 24 hrs. See if they don't come begging. I hope I haven't fed them too much such that they have their secret food store to tide through the famine, and hope they are sensible and do the RIGHT THING.

death

Peanut passed away during the day yesterday.

In memory of this cute little peanut, here are some photos...

Frazzled peanut, fur damp from my hand. Wiping himself frantically!

Peering out of my grasp =)

And peering more intently!

the gerbil's den

Herby and gerby have dug into their boxes and set up a neat tunnel system. Before I get pictures up (not sure how I'm going to) let me try to describe.

They have two boxes stacked on top of each other, with a hole linking both. They first dug downwards into the top box (entrance #1) and dug through the hole linking the two boxes and they chewed around the hole to enlarge it. Then they dug backwards through basement 2 to exit from the back of the box (near the back of the tank), and they dug upwards, creating another tunnel entrance from the back of the tank going straight to basement 2.

Rocks huh =)

digging gerbils

Firstly, my micro SD card spoilt so it's not possible to transfer some photos over from my phone. Sigh. Looking forward to equip my comp with bluetooth.

But I shall describe Herby and Gerby's new tank. They dig, yep, dug plenty. I washed them last Sunday and filled it with two and a half packets of soil (half from the leftover from the previous time). They explored, dug around, hesitantly prodding the ground but not being very careful where they stepped. Their feet sunk slightly into the ground despite me pressing down on the soil such that their box actually flattened a bit (oops).

But after about half an hour they found their wooden house! Their behaviour changes immediately upon finding their house...you can see them frantically start to burrow and dig and soil flies behind them like a sandstorm (that's what it would be in the desert!).

And once inside the house they continue digging at the glass bottom. Ouch! But good for them la, go shorten their nails =P

I went back again on Monday and they still had not found the other box then. I picked them up one at a time and told them "you think mummy and daddy so bad to you all only give you one house arh. They looked at me puzzedly as I patted their heads and then put them back down. Due to the high level of the soil, they could actually, at some parts, reach their paws to cling onto the glass edge and struggle to wiggle themselves up. But once they peer over and see nowhere to grip onto, they give up. Once I put my face so near to gerby that she tried to climb onto my nose!

The way they dig is really fascinating. When they find a burrow of interest, you can see their interest being multiplied by a zillion, and they will dig till they cant dig any deeper, before running back to the start and digging again. As a result their burrow is seldom a steep side in the direction of their digging. It ends up smooth! Maybe the sand dunes of the desert are made by a million gerbils doing that! Oh man, I wanna live in the desert (kidding). Or maybe there are huge gigantic monstrous invisible gerbils. Well, I'll save that for an "I told you so" years later =P

Go herby gerby! =)

you can't separate the butter from peanut butter

Delicious Spread
Butter See, Peanut Do

Hey peanut, nice and round you are! What are you looking at?

Nothing la...hee =)

There you go again, peanut! Distracted.

Nothing la...hee =)

He gets bored, so I place him back in his cage and try to get Butter out. But peanut climbs onto my hand as well! Attention seeker...

Peanut butter climbing all over my hand. Peering left and right.

Peanut tries to explore the ball of my palm and ends up nearly slipping down.

Dark picture of peanut curled into a ball while butter looks downwards.

Their positions quite boring. Never change!