Chinchillas can be so ungrateful!

Thistle and Teazel have been happily guzzling milk formula for 4 weeks or so now – I have been using generic evaporated milk in their formula which they have taken with no problem but I decided to add Carnation to my grocery shopping list last weekend – a bit of a treat I thought. What-a-mistake-a-to-make-a. For the first time in several weeks I have returned from work to find some milk remaining in the mouse bottles – clearly they don’t like the Carnation so its back to buying the cheap, generic stuff then.

Honestly, you buy these chinnies the best and they turn their little furry noses up at it! They do make me laugh – I can spend a fortune on toys for them and they get more excited about a cardboard toilet roll or an old-fashioned dolly peg!

You’ve got to love them.

The twins are doing very well now – they are piling on the weight and are not looking quite so spindly as they were a week or so ago. Chinchilla kits are so funny when they are first born – they have huge heads, a whippy tail, and long legs. They kind of “grow into” their heads over a period of weeks.
They are little hooligans and now run to the back of the cage to hide when it is time for me to catch them and swap them over. Then they wriggle like crazy – honestly, you’d think they would be grateful for all the effort we humans put in to raising kits when things don’t go smoothly! But oh no, it’s “let me GO!!” *wriggle, wriggle, squirm, squirm* and then they jump all over their poor mothers once they are in with them.
I’ll see if they will sit still long enough for me to take some updated photos during the week – I have loads of photos of spaces where chins were, tails and bottoms, and blurry grey streaks!

One of my females is due – I’ve been impatient all week long and I was convinced she was due on Thursday. Seems there is a wormhole in time and space between the rest of the outside world and my chin room because in there I seem to be a week ahead of the rest of the planet!! She’s not actually due until Friday. Oops!! So that’s two weeks of impatient thumb twiddling before she is due. LOL
Bless her, her sides were rippling like a stormy sea on Thursday so the kits are obviously trying to boot their way out already. She is currently lying on her heat mat looking very fed up. When I did the feed run this evening she just opened one eye and I could almost hear her tutting as she closed it again and went back to sleep.