Yay! Happy Birthday to my beautiful friend, Tegan the guinea pig!

She is 6 years old now!

And, this is, officially, old age for a guinea pig. The average lifespan for GPs is five years, tho they have been known to live up to eight years.

Tegan has been getting the super deluxe breakfast every morning, all this month. The mandatory slice of orange so she gets her Vitamin C, a little slice of apple, some dried fruit and of course her yummy frozen peas. She has snubbed the apple this morning, but she loves the dried fruit. She also gets her regular guinea pig food, and two piles of timothy hay.

Because of the heat, Tegan had to spend a couple days this week downstairs in her "summer home". We don't have air conditioning, and during the summer, the upstairs rooms can get above 90°s! As soon as my thermometer is approaching 85°, Tegan gets relocated and has a fan pointed at her.

I hate it, because her downstairs house is a cage. There just isn't room for me to build a decent home for her. And she only uses it for a few weeks a year, anyway, but it still annoys me. And her.

To make up for sticking her in a tiny space, on the cooler days when she's in her regular home, I've been leaving the door open. Heck, she occasionally gets it open on her own anyway, so I may as well spare her the effort!

laughs. So, she has the run of my bedroom all the time. My room is guinea pig proofed, and I put a safty gate across the door so she doesn't go wandering into the hallway (where the stairs, down, are). She walks around, eats the hay, maybe chews on a cardboard box.

So! Tegan's happy, even tho we didn't do anything special for her birthday... It's more like celebrating her every day! Here she is, she's put a dent into her hay pile. And that's her birthday card behind her, sent from my parents. :)

Happy Every Day, Tegan!!

Static8 > Journal > Archive > 15 July 2007 Entry