The Guinea Pig Handbook

As many of you know we were lucky enough to have Annabelle the kitty for the last couple years of her life. The boys really adored her and she actually liked them too, I think, even if she found Connor to be a little too unpredictable at times. She had these very specific ways of joining the family unit. We read books on the couch in the living room every night before bed and wherever she was in the house she would come running up and sit with all of us purring and squinting, which appears to be cat for "you please me at the moment." They took her departure hard, and still remember her very clearly and fondly. We were looking at the kitties for adoption while we were at the pet store recently and Jamie had to walk away. He said it made him think of Annabelle and that made him sad.

But of course, it wasn't too long after she died that the boys were clamouring for another pet. Some months of negotiation and thought followed. Connor at one point wanted a talking bird, mainly because of the one in the Judy Blume Fudge series, which says obnoxious things in French with impeccable comedic timing. I worried that any bird we got would have lacked either the obnoxiousness, the French, or worse, the timing, and so been a disappointment.

So we settled on guinea pigs for a few reasons (good combination of small size, ease of cleaning up, pleasant temperament, willingness to snuggle and cuteness). But being academics, we wanted to study them first, so we went to the store, looked at some, watched their behavior and then bought The Guinea Pig Handbook, a comprehensive and reliable guide. Jamie really dug into the task. He went to bed reading it and sat at breakfast with it open all the next week. He became quite knowledgeable about guinea pigs. (I pictured two guinea pigs somewhere that week munching parsley and reading The Little Boy Handbook.) This meant that not only was he well-prepared for their arrival the next weekend but he was prepared to ignore misinformation. One of their friends has a pet gerbil and insisted that if you tried to hold the guinea pig it would run away, because that's what the gerbil does. Jamie maintained steadfastedly that it was otherwise and when the friend continued to insist he just walked away and said, with a very very slight touch of pity in his voice, "You don't have The Guinea Pig Handbook."

Just before we got them we settled on Roma and Kouklia for the names, after the two places we stayed this summer. Sarah suggested this and after a week of constant fluctuation on names they settled on it very quickly. So the boys do indeed love the guinea pigs. The pigs tend to try to get away when we got to pick them up (I think instinctually for them a hand coming from above reads as "hawk"), but, as The Guinea Pig Handbook suggested, are very happy to snuggle once they've been caught, and they realize we are not hawks.