greenstorm | Baby Update

Like all new moms, I'm swamped in dirty diapers and baby feeding... no wait, that's Silver. She's the one doing all the work around here, and she looks absolutely exhausted all of the time. The babies are growing insanely fast and developing new features every couple of hours.

48 hours:

96 Hours:

(You can see the big piglet of the litter on top of everyone, lower left)

They're amazing to watch. The big piggie boy can almost crawl now, instead of just wriggling. Their markings are starting to come clear-- some are like Granddad's, some are like mom's with one spot behind the eer, some are like dad's. It's amazing. Just... nevermind.

Lizzy and some other ratty people came to visit last night and freaked Silver right out-- combination of having strange rats in the room, lots of strange people, and me changing the next after hangling the babies. She settled down quickly after running around the cage with a baby in her mouth trampling on the other babies, in fact, she settled down the second everyone was out and the door was closed. The next day she was momentarily nippy, but settled down about thirty seconds after realising it was just me. She really is the sweetest mum. she's very reluctant to leave the babies alone now, though, and she makes her nests nearly impenetrable-- they were formerly sloppy. This may be because of the strange boy rat in the room, too, who's supposed to be providing stud duty for Lightning. Boy rats tend to eat babies.

We've pretty much decided that skinny (bottom right in the 48-hour grouping of all eight babies) probably has some sort of damage, because she just doesn't move right. Possible partial paralysis. she's gaining lots of weight, though, and always has milk in her belly, so we'll see...

As you can clearly see, my rat babies are the most beautiful rat babies in the world. Lookit the whiskers!

Thank you so so so so so much for letting me borrow your camera, Avi, the internet obviously needs hundreds more pictures of my rats!