Squeaky Toys.

Yesterday we picked up Nin’s two new siblings. One is a tiny little (5-6 week old) double-rex girl who will be named Sophie or, perhaps, Flower or maybe Rabbit, or.. okay, so we’re not getting far on the naming thing. The other is a champagne rattish (about 8 weeks old) with deep ruby eyes (she’s not a PEW) whose name will be selected by Coffee (which means she’ll be named in a few weeks if we’re lucky). The third rat we had selected had porphyrin around her nose and a terrible wheeze – so we couldn’t let her live with us without incurring some big vet bills and shoving antibiotics into her. Not fair to her or the other rats.

The introductions went very smoothly – a dab of vanilla on each neck, a bathtub with a towel (and me) in it, a handfull of Cheerios (aka, “rat crack”) and .. it’s like they’ve known each other forever. There has been much grooming and sniffing and a few assertions of dominance, but life in the cage seems quite peaceful at the moment.

Baby rat is having the time of her life. She chases the older girls around, climbing on them and attacking their tails any chance she’s given. We laughed heartily yesterday when she was being particularly crazy and bounding around like a speed freak – Nin’s response was to casually kick her in the head a few times without even turning to glance at her. It didn’t stop Baby Rat for a second; she continued to clamor around and squeak like a fool.

I have to confess: the squeaking was very hard for me to listen to at first. Nin was a mostly silent rat for the time she was alone – she saved up all her sound effects for her time on my shoulders. Clicking and bruxing and making tiny squeaks of happiness as I prodded her belly and smooched her little face. Both new rats are quite vocal and, as a result, I keep thinking they’re killing each other. In pain! Dying! Instead, they are chasing and grooming and playing and, well, chatting with each other. I’m glad Coffee was home for the introductions – he had to keep reassuring me that everything was fine. And, indeed, there was no bloodshed and there were no screams. Just good old fashioned ratty fun. This morning the squeaking sounded much more ‘happy’ to me – especially combined with three little rat faces demanding food at the cage door.

Speaking of the cage.. The two bottom rooms of the cage are still ‘in progress’ but I’m hoping to finish them up today so I can post some pictures this week. It’s harder than I expected to furnish the rooms, what with not being a rat, so I keep tossing in random things and letting the little creatures decide on placement. Do they want to climb? Hide? Run? Open space or crowded room? I need to make a trip to Home Depot for some plumbing tubes/pipes for them to crawl through and around, and I need to put in a few more hammocks on the various levels, but otherwise we’re totally on the home stretch. I can’t WAIT for you to see the cage, of course, but I can’t wait to post pictures of the whole family. Yummy little rattishes.