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.