hammy always grooms herself after i take her outside to play. like my hands get her fur dirty LOL. she loves eating uncooked peanuts. today i gave her two of them, and the top of a corn on the cob. she doesnt seem to like the corn as much today. but i didnt like it quite as much either so i dont really blame her. here she is eating her peanut.

and i feel really bad about little foot, i think i fed him too much. today was his third time ever eating. the first day was last tuesday, which was the head of a pinky mouse. then friday was the second day, which was the smaller half of the body, cut straight down from neck to bottom and then that cut in half, and today was the second half of the mouse, which was a little bigger than that on friday. now he just looks so overly full. i hope he's okay, he usually sits under his lamp and falls asleep after eating, but today he,s hiding in his cave completely out of sight! i hope it's still warm enough in there so he can metabolize tonight's dinner! frankly, i'm a little worried about him, but my hubby says he should be fine since he was able to get it down. here he is right after i put him back in his little critter keeper. you can see how streched out his spots are, and when i was holding him right after he ate, i looked really closely at it and all his skin was stretched out so far, his scales didnt even touch anymore! i really hope he comes outside of his cave soon and sits in the light!
here he's resting his head on his rock/cave.

hammy is so funny. she's always running around at full energy and then without warning she'll completely be pooped out and passed out somewhere. but after just a couple minutes of revival she'll be up and about again. here she is right next to the entrance of her potty. great place to be pooped out, eh?

hehehe, i love my critters. but i love my husband way more. i love you, hien =) <3

her new habitat is so roomy!!!

yay hammy has dual residency now! she's been up at my parents house for the past year but now we've just acquired all the things needed so that she can stay down here with us during the week, and then she can travel with us and stay at my parents house during the weekends when we go to visit them!

we were fortunate to find a girl that had gently used housing items, and we purchased a QUIET wheel, a little house, hamster ball, food bowl and a critter keeper container (for transportation) and a gnaw stick holder all for just over $13!!! what a great price! now she can be with me all the time instead of just the weekends!!! <3!!!>

So we have a new addition to our little family. We introduce... Little Foot! The baby wandering garter snake, Thamnophis elegans vagrans, that stumbled into our lives on August 5, 2010. My friend Clare and I found him in the garage, and my awesome hubby let me keep him. In this picture he is holding my finger while sleeping *awww*. So my husband and I have been taking care of this little guy since. He was a newborn, (when Clare and I found him, she claimed he still had his "beak") and when I took him into a few pet stores, I had confirmation from them that Little Foot couldn't be more than a few days old. I had been SOOOOOOO stressed out because we couldnt get LF to eat ANYTHING! We got him crickets, worms (night crawlers that were three times his size which we cut accordingly), guppies, cat food (thanks clare for giving us a can), and I actually called up this lady that just had garter snake babies to ask her what she did, and after obtaining her advice, I tried to hold his head and force feed him the guppies. OH I felt so terrible after because he was so scared afterwards, and was mad at me for a little while after that. I handle him daily, and he's become accustomed to being held. You just hold your hand in front of his face, he'll make eye contact with you, and slither right on to your hand! Who would have thought! He's more tame than Hammy is.

And today was the first day I could sigh relief, because he finally ate! Goodness, I was so shocked. Last night, my hubby and I drove for about an hour to get a pinky mouse (newborn). It looked exactly like the name sounds like. It was small and pink. I had a hard time with it, trying to be vegan and all (my sister says I'm a bad vegan for this), but I found it more humane to freeze the poor thing, and THEN feed it to LF. But LF is far too small to eat the whole pinky, so I had to decapitate it. I shivered at the act. It has to be the most morbid thing I'd ever done in my life! I don't think I'd ever purposely killed an animal (minus the spiders and other bugs that I find inside the house) before. I felt like such a horrible person, feeling sick to my stomache and I was shaky because I felt so terrible. But I fed the pinky's head to LF, and he went for it without hesitation! I should have tried to feed him pinkies before we spent all that time and money on other things! What is silly about this little guy (I actually think Little Foot is a girl, because of the pattern of scales by the anus as well as the shape of the tail being long and slender instead of being short and stubby) is that he likes the water. LF drank lots of water. Stuck his face in his water bowl and moved his head back and forth (washing his face I called it). And that wasn't enough, so he got entirely into the water bowl and started swimming around (taking a bath now). Silly isn't it? Little Foot likes to wash up after meals.

Makes me smile.

Meet Hammy and Baby Cat.

So my wonderful husband had taken some more awesome photos of our critters. He's such an talented photographer and an amazing husband. I'm so lucky to have him.

This is Hammy, our teddy bear hamster. She's supposed to have long fur, but she only has long fur behind her ears and on her butt. She used to be grey, but now her fur is turning a tannish color. I wonder why she's turning brown. Maybe she's taking after Baby Cat. Because Baby Cat used to be more of a grey/blue color, and she's turning brown too. Why the organic colors?

And this is Baby Cat. She's cute and she knows it. She's entirely spoiled, but that's okay because she plays fetch, and she likes to find things that you hide for her, and she'll put her toys away.

*wipe wipe* palps aka windshield wipers

It is the absolute cutest thing when mozart wipes her eyes with her palps (the little fuzzy appendage-like things that are right next to her bright green fangs.) they look like itty, bitty, fuzzy windshield wipers that just alternate cleaning one eye to the next. She'll usually clean her eyes and her feet after play time, when she gets to play outside of her container. Today she's been entirely overactive, walking 'round and 'round the cylindrical plastic as if asking me is it time to play now? how about now? now? play? play time now? so i've let her outside many a many a times today. it's awfully windy today too, which disappointed me earlier today because the harsh wind caved her little web house in, forcing me to clean it out. now she has to make a new nest to sleep and have privacy. i hope she wasnt too mad at me when she realized it was not there anymore. well, actually she's been playing with me all day, so i'm not too sure she even notices its absense.



looks like she's cleaning her feet right now. rubbing them vigorously against each other. ope, now she is looking at me and moving her palps up and down. i think she wants to come outside again. i wonder if the palps are a way for spiders of the same species to communicate. mozart is always walking, stopping abruptly and looks straight at me, and she moves her palps up and down quickly and slowly. i've never noticed any patterns of her palpal movement, and when i move my lips in fish-kiss movement or use my index and middle finger to mimic her palps it always seems like she responds to me. we take turns moving our palps up and down and then she walks away. it's quite strange.



actually, when i first began trying to interact with mozart, i pretended that my fingers were palps. she used to hide inside of her nest house whenever anything came by her sanctuary. unless it was food, anyways, then she caught on quick when it was time to eat, she'd be stalking her prey before it was even in the container. eventually, i was able to get her to peek outside, with her two front feet and her little face, and i would use my fingers to "palp" talk with her. she'd move her palps, and i'd move mine. it took a little bit of time before she would fully expose herself and leave her little house. but now she seems to always be wanting to come outside and play. it's such a cute thing. she's like my little puppy that i dont have to poop scoop with a plastic baggy.



she does get shy and nervous around people that she doesnt know yet though. she keeps a keen eye on them, literally moving her head to track their movement. she'll hide if in a wrinkle of my jacket and peer out from there to watch them. after feeling safe again, she will leave the wrinkle and walk around again.







maybe this weekend i will have my husband spend some time with her. he's been my partner-caretaker of mozart since we adopted her, and the other day at the library, he put his index finger forward to try to get her to walk onto it, and instead of doing so, she stood tall in a deffensive position, raised her two front legs and palps. i said to him, "ummmm... maybe you should take your finger away because it looks like she's going to attack you." it made me sad that she felt that he was a threat! for goodness sake he's the other hand that feeds her!!! but i suppose it is also because i carry mozart around with me everywhere. she always sees my face throughout her days. maybe she can be my guard dog.



she's also a very clumsy spider. she has a safety line that her spinnerettes frequently attach to different surface areas, to ensure that if she fails a jump, she will not plummet to her death. many times she forgets about these safety lines that are an array inside of her container and she'll jump right into it, trying to get to something else - i.e. a cricket or some sort of other food, and she'll get tangled and she'll hang awkwardly upsidedown while trying to get her feet to find something to grip and correct her position.



just to make another point, since she's eaten that cricket yesterday, her poops have quadrupled in size. and it looks like white-out. perhaps i will be able to patent an all-natural-non-chemical smelling spider poop white-out.

mozart pooped on me!!!

these pictures were just taken last night, so now you can see the difference between the before molt and after molt. when i let her out last night for these pictures, she turned her tiny butt to her right side, i saw her spinnerettes moving quickly, and suddenly a small greyish drop fell onto my pinky. EW! she pooped on me! it looked like a tiny grey bird poop and my husband smeared it all over my finger with a tissue. i'd never had a spider poop on me before. but there's a first for everything.

she still has the beautiful heart on her back. you can see on her semi-profile picture though that her head has grown enormously pretty much over night! her body is so little compared to her head! she is actually eating a cricket as i type. so her abdomen is swelling up plump again and she is looking much more proportionate. which also means that little white heart is getting bigger... heheh i feel so special to have a beautiful spider with a heart to show off!

she has been extremely active today. it seems like she's getting used to going to school with me everyday. before i began taking her to school with me, she hid in her house a lot. but now that she's been getting to go 'round, she's been very interactive. when we wake up in the mornings she's awake and walking around in the container and she is not scared! she loves walking around all over my hand and jumping hand to hand.

ope, it looks like she's done with the cricket now. she just dropped its shriveled remains on the floor of her container and is now resting in her little house. awwwwww she has fooood coma! so precious!!!

molting

look at the perfect little heart on her back! i love it!

These pictures were taken just a few days before she molted. look how beautiful she is! These awesome pictures were taken by my wonderful husband! He's so good at his work!!!

I'm so please with how they turned out!!!

so mozart was molting the other day. she'd never done that before, so i completely freaked out. i thought she was dead bc when i tipped the container over her whole body just tipped over too. and her legs were all gnarled and broken looking. i was so scared that i'd lost my little mozart! she's been with us since last summer! ahhhh!!! but then i looked again and realized that my little mozart is growing up. she came outside to play yesterday, and she was playing peek a boo with me, like she always does before she comes outside, and when she peeked out of her little house, i said "oh my god your head is so huge! yeah, her body looks about the same size as before, but her head is probably about one and a half times bigger! i was so shocked at how big she'd gotten so quickly! literally in a day's time!

she's just sitting on my computer right now while i type. just chillin i suppose. it's far too cold outside today so we cant go play outside. makes me kind of sad because she'd been so excited to come out and play all morning long.

i think it's funny how quickly is seems like she picks things up. in math class today, after i set her down inside of my bag, she came part way out of her house for the duration of the class. and when everyone started to leave she went back inside her house, as if she's getting ready to go! so cute!!!!

and now we wait for english to start. i didnt feel like going to my usual sitting places because it's so damn cold outside today, so we're just sitting in the hallway of the english building. boring i know. it's much more fun outside. mayber later. i can only hope the weather gets better so that my little mozart can enjoy some outside time today.