In all her glory!

Alfalfa’s hair has gotten so long and beautiful over the course of the past year. Her 1st birthday was last month, and I think her luscious locks have finally reached their full potential!

Cayenne after bath time

This is the part they actually like: the part where I wrap them in a towel and give them a massage

Piggies in the sink!

They loath baths…

This is a rare serene moment before they realize where they are and start frantically trying to escape the sink.

A close call…

Cayenne’s 1st birthday is coming up very soon, so I was reminiscing about her first days with me.

I picked her up the day before Thanksgiving, gave her a bath and left her in her new home to get used to things while I traveled to my home town to spend Thanksgiving with my family.

When I got back I was so excited to bring her out and cuddle with her, so I went straight to her cage and picked her up. My boyfriend at the time was with me, and we held her and tried to play with her and feed her hay, but she was acting very strange. She felt like she had lost weight in just the 2 nights that I had been away from my apartment even though I’d left her a full bottle of water, a large bowl of food, and a pile of hay. We grew concerned as we noticed that she was barely moving and seemed tired.

A guinea pig will never act tired around someone they are not comfortable with, so this was alarming. I became worried, and I knew that she was sick. And once a guinea pig gets sick, they usually don’t get better.

But we were persistent. We held her and made her drink from the water bottle, and to our surprise she took to it! Once she realized what it was she drank as much water as she could hold, and I was hopeful that she was finally out of it.

That night I woke up at around 3am and got her out of her cage. I held her on my chest and cuddled her to make her feel safe. I looked into her eyes and saw that she was having trouble keeping them open. She looked so sick…

My eyes filled with tears as I became sure she wouldn’t make it through the night. I held her until I began to fall asleep, and then I put her in her cage and went to bed, still fearing that she would be gone when I woke up.

The next morning I rushed to her cage to confirm my fears, and I found her still huddled in the corner with her eyes half open. My boyfriend and I spent the most of that day with her, forcing her to eat and drink and just trying to make her feel comfortable.

Finally, that evening, as we were trying to persuade her to eat a bit of celery, she wheeked!

From that point on she steadily grew stronger, healthier, and more sociable, and now she’s a big, fat lump of a pig who enjoys a comfortable life with her best friend Alfalfa

Show quality pig!

Alfalfa’s hair is getting so long! It’s become more difficult to tell which breed she is: it’s sort of a toss-up between Peruvian and Sheba. She has rosettes in some places and Peruvians are supposed to have a natural center part.

I’ve also been noticing some disconcerting signs when I’m interacting with her. I think she may be blind :/

I think this because when I come near Cayenne she’ll run away and hide (which is normal), but Alfalfa doesn’t seem to care. And when I go to pick her up it seems like she doesn’t see my hand coming towards her and when I touch her she jumps like she wasn’t expecting it.

It doesn’t really matter, she is healthy and obviously able to live just like a normal pig, but it still worries me.

The new pig mansion:

It’s a little messy right now because the girlies have got wood shavings all over the bottom area. You can’t see them, but they’re in there hiding under the blanket

New digs for the pigs!

A large, multi-level C&C cage is in progress for the piggies!

It’s going to be 2 x 4 on the bottom with an upper 2 x 2 dining area on one side. I’m planning on using fleece blankets instead of wood shavings since my girls love running around on the fleece in their play pen. I’ve got the cubes already set up, now I just have to buy the coroplast and teach the piggies how to use the ramp and they’ll be set. I’ll be posting pictures once I get everything finished.

Also, I made them a tunnel and a piggy pocket so they’ll have a more comfortable place to sleep.