Week 19

My mom made it to my brother’s birthday dinner!

It was really, really important to my brother that she go, and she did, and everyone had a nice time.

Phew!

Also, we got Michaela two guinea pigs: Nibbles and Sparkles.

A friend suggested that getting Michaela a creature to care for might help her process everything that’s happening with my mom. Michaela has really wanted a cat, but I’m allergic. Mike wanted a dog, but that’s so much work. So we compromised and decided to explore a guinea pig.

As it turns out, piggies are social animals, so you’re supposed to get two. I talked to the Humane Society but, thanks to COVID, you basically do a phone interview and if they approve you, you go get your animal the next day and take it home. No meeting the animal in advance, no chance to see if you’d bond. And that was just too weird to me! The local small pet rescue didn’t have any openings to meet animals until late August, and we were looking to move sooner. So I was thrilled when someone in our local Buy Nothing group was looking to re-home her two piggies.

Sparkles is about a year old. She had some sort of condition when she was born so had surgery (can you imagine doing surgery on a tiny animal? I cannot!) but is fine now.

FiFi, who Michaela has renamed Nibbles, is 3 or 4 years old. She’s an Abyssinian, which means she is bigger and has very long, unruly hair (fur).

We have a variety of cages and Michaela’s room now looks like a pet store, with the food and Timothy hay and bedding and such. The girls are very nervous still and not acclimated to our house yet, but Michaela is over the moon.