Well I haven’t updated this for a bit but we have been very busy with little Lois. Let the massive post commence:
She is such a cute little ham but has some odd habits and I think some are because of her previous ownership, she doesn’t come out until 11pm but is awake well into the day and I think that’s because the old owners dog was out in the evening but kept out of the room she was in the rest of the day/night. I am hoping we can convince her to change this over time but it’s hard to do in a nice way, especially as she isn’t food orientated so currently we are partially nocturnal so we can get some evening hugs and play.
The training is going really well, I am so proud of her she has come so far in such a short amount of time. She loves coming out for snuggles and tends to stand by the door looking very cute waiting for us to open the door and then she runs out onto our hands. She hasn’t got used to being picked up completely but is fine with being scooped up / putting both hands round them so they sort of shuffle onto your palms and being turned over to give her a health check. As I have never felt it that necessary to be able to pick up a hamster with fingers and thumb round the middle if they are comfortable with you as the other two work just find and seem more comfy for the hamster I don’t mind if she never learns this.
I haven’t ever weighed my hamsters before but given how small she was when I got her I think I will have too, however she looks much sturdier already so we are going in the right direction. Her small size is maybe due the food she had previously (it didn’t look that good quality or that tasty to me), or she wasn’t fed enough. She is also pretty un-interested in food in general which is hard to get to grips with, hamsters are normally such little hoovers so having one that isn’t that bothered about treats of all sorts is weird and disconcerting. She will eat broccoli, carrots, cucumber, drops, cherry etc but it’s more like she is doing me a favour not like she trying to scoff it fast because it might disappear. Maybe she is just a picky little Madame
.
We moved her into her new Alexander early (we had wanted to get all the bits plasti-koted ) as she was clearly so upset in that horrible shoe box of a cage she came in, so as soon as it arrived she was moved over with the small amount of woodshavings (I know… her new cage is filled with some care-fresh and some hemp, I liked the hemp and so does Lois but I appear to a bit allergic to it so I have ordered a massive bag of fitch and will start adding that in) from her old cage and bedding (toilet tissue) etc to try and make her as comfy as possible. She immediately homed in on the new enormous by comparison wheel and spent the rest of the night almost running happily on it. Instead of sleeping in the nice new house that had her old bedding in it she has moved into a carrot house in the opposite corner over her digging area. We actually blocked the top half of cage off as we have nothing to stop her from falling top to bottom at the moment but as half the Alexander is about 4-5 times the size of her old cage I think she will be ok while we work out the top half. She immediately peed all over her new un-plasti-koted wheel (could have known that was going to happen) but I couldn’t leave her even with the medium sized silent spinner we had she really didn’t fit in it properly.
Lois in her new “bed”
She then proceeded to be a lot more aloof with us for a few days and one night we weren’t even able to get her out of the cage for some hugs (she is a very social ham in general who seems to adore hugs which is great
). I am really glad there are threads on here where people mention how grumpy a hamling can get when you do a cage change because it was very stressful for us to see how grumpy she was if that makes sense, if her old cage hadn’t been terrible I would have probably snapped and put her back.
“How dare you move stuff around, I am going to ignore you and have a drink”
Lois seems to get stressed quickly when it is warm, I think that because of the poor ventilation from her old cage as it was basically a hot box and she gets nervous it’s going to toast up quickly. So about a week after she moved to the Alexander we put a granite tile on the roof of her ignored bed and a sand bath in her toilet corner (a great salt pig from amazon that is the perfect size for her). All evening she was grumpy as anything bless her, she stood there glaring at us for ages. However, after all the grumps because we changed her cage without her say so, she spent the next night almost solely in her new sand bath happily wriggling around, such a naughty cutie.
“Ok I forgive you, especially with a peanut treat” (don’t worry she doesn’t get many of these)
“To excited to even finish my peanut”
She does love her ball but I would much rather get her interested in her play pen, which she really doesn’t seem to like much,
does anyone have any tips? She doesn’t play with the toys she mostly spend the time in one corner trying to dig her way out.
She stated chewing/pulling at the bars of her new cage (I can’t blame her that’s all there was to do in her old cage apart from run on top of her tiny wheel), but it seems to correlate to knowing that I don’t like it and that she wants to come out for a second or third hug of the evening. We put a hanging chew where she was nibbling that that seemed to mostly stop her until one night she savaged the rope the chew was on and cut her poor little nose. I don’t think it hurt that much and it seems to have healed quickly I was going to post the picture below asking what people thought but as it was so fast to heal I didn’t.
“Look mum it’s not that bad”
We moved onto putting a large natural stick into that section of the cage to try and discourage her (which it has). The next day I noticed it was wobbly so moved it to stabilise it however this meant it was high enough for her to launch herself at the top floor and climb up. She must be bright as a button because she was up there within about 20 seconds of the possibility of getting up there occurring. Such a naughty little cheeky ham. Since then at every opportunity she has sneaked up to the top floor as soon as its available (within about 20 seconds) she is so observant and smart. There have been several chances as we have been fitting her top layer together etc.
She is now mildly chewing in variously places, we have tried pegs and she goes to town on them but she worked out very early on that she can push the bottom half with her paw and pull the top half with her teeth and get them to spring apart
(does anyone know somewhere that does the pegs that have the wire go round the side?) – she looks so pleased when she does this it’s so cute, it’s her party trick. She then runs towards us with the peg half in her mouth and sort of lobs it at us. I am pretty sure if she could talk she would say something like “look you left this for me to bring to you right? I did it super quick just for you”, all the while giggling like crazy. I haven’t managed to get a pic of her looking smug and carrying her prize around yet but I hopefully will. We have also tried to wipe the bars with olive oil but she doesn’t seem to mind the taste of this particularly, she licks it a bit then paws it and then carries on.
Maybe we haven’t put enough on?
Her upstairs floor is now open for business but still not finished I will show you all a pic when it is done.
I also went on an enamelling course recently and didn’t have a specific design for the enamel painting day, I can’t paint (I really can’t, everything ends up as blocks of colour floating on other blocks) but I am really pleased with how my enamel picture of Lois turned out.
The picture I copied.
The first bake.
The second bake.
The final plaque.
The only problem is that I feel I am going to have to do one for every hamster I have from now on or they will feel left out
I promise that my posts in the future will be shorter, more fun and have more hamster pics. It’s been a crazy month or so with lots of courses as I am going to try to start a Jewellery business from home while still working a day job as an engineer.
PPS She has also been held and stroked by my parents at the weekend and she was happy as larry, I am SO pleased with how she has done I am a very proud ham mum.
Re: Little Lois
. We are considering trying to fit in a detolf, the Alexander is great but I think she is more suited to one floor living but that will have to wait until at least October.
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