On the First Day of Christmas, my Slave she gave to me....A Partridge in a Pear Tree.
Niamh: Eeek! What is that?
Slave: It is a partridge.
Niamh: Why?
Slave: We are going to enact a song and in the first verse a man gives his true love a partridge in a pear tree.
Niamh: That is a funny present but I will go along with it. So where is the pear tree?
Slave: There is one in the garden but it is raining and I am sure that you do not want to go outside to be photographed next to it and.besides, there are no pears on it in the winter.
Niamh: Quite right and I do not like pears anyway.
Slave: How about a piece of apple?
Niamh: Now that is a good present. What happens next?
Slave: You will have to wait until tomorrow to find out.
Happy Holidays Everyone. Here are few photos of the Piggyfriends celebrating. Magnus, Ivan and Mimi were our victims ( sorry subjects ) and they were handsomely rewarded with veggies afterwards.
Hey Squirly look out the window. There is snow says Honeydew. Let's go
slide down the hill on our pink fleece! Brrrr it is too cold to go out
in the snow. Close the door says Squirly. Only slaves should go out in
the snow to get us grass.
We had our very own Christmas card in the mail this morning.
It is from the Surrey Squeakers, whose blog we follow and that is a pigture of Meg Squeaker on the front. Please do not peg it up on Machu Picchu and Kiwi's pen or they might eat it like they did their name card. Let us put it where we can all see it.
Thank you very much Surrey Squeakers!
Can we make our own Christmas cards? Please, Slave, please? "We will have to see about that sweeties. It is too late for this year but maybe next Christmas. We need to find out how it is done and one of you is going to have to sit very still for the photo. No running off and hiding under the table."
As well all know Pigmas is coming, in fact it will be upon us before we know it and once again those clever humans at Bloomsbury Publishing have come up with a perfect gift for the festive season.....may we present A Guinea Pig Christmas Carol we particularly liked the author photo.
As people who read the gpdd know, we, the guinygirlz and Binky, and the piggyfriends went on a (virtual) adventure to visit guinea pig friends in the US for Halloween. The pigs had loads of fun but they were really tied after the long journey home.
This is what I found after they had settled in back home...
Slave Mieke and exhausted guinygirlz Raani and Cookie
After a very mild autumn in England it is getting colder today. Slave's friend Pat emailed her to say that they have 7 inches of snow in Canada where she lives and her poor piggies cannot have fresh grass. So, in case that happens here, Magnus and Ivan have abandoned their houses and bagged themselves a place next to a radiator.
We were away visiting our friend, Avalanche, who threw a Hallowe'en Party when it was Slave's birthday but here are some photos of her presents. It is always easy to find a present for a piggy person.
This little orange and white piggy was a gift from our pigsitter, her eldest son. He is sitting on some flowery fleece and has not made a mess with some beetroot.
Isn't he sweet? Slave does needlepoint so he also gave her a kit to make a pigture of two piggies.
She says that she cannot start it yet as she has a half finished picture on her frame at the moment but as soon as that one is finished, she will start making the piggy pigture.
A package arrived in the mail and guess what was inside. Another little piggy, twin to the first one......
....except that this little piggy is a tricolour. This one came from our one time Junior Slave, who lives in the US now. They did not know what each other had bought as a gift and they chose almost identical piggies. What a coincidence!
Here they are together.
We will have to nag Slave to make the pigture so that we can show the finished article to you. Slave says that they take a long time as she just does little bits when she has spare time and, with all of us to care for, she does not have much of that.
Hello fellow piggies, regular readers may have noticed there has been an increase in spam posts appearing on the blog. It appears that some sad humans have nothing better to do than try and convince us guinea pigs to buy something only humans would care about. To put a stop to this happening we have updated the Contribute settings this means all post will now require moderation by one of us blogging piggies before they appear on the blog. This may mean a slight delay between when you send your blog post and when it is actually visible but it will mean we don't have to see stupid human posts anymore!!!
In other news here at Piggypals the weather has turned decidedly chilly and we are glad we live indoors with all mod cons including central heating.
The evil one is also learning to behave and now we are allowed to play together in the evenings and at weekends while the humans are around to make sure no fighting occurs, you never know we may be able to actually live together full time at some point in the future.
Let us know what is going on with you guys, we love hearing from you all.
All of the Piggyfriends would like to wish you a very Happy Hallowe'en. We are off to a party courtesy of our friend Avalanche but we posed for some photos before we left.
Niamh will always sit nicely for a photo. Here she is.
" Do you think that I might get some of that apple?" she asks. " Of course you will sweetie," replies Slave.
Slave did not expect Mimi to stay still but she obliged with the following photos.
Then it was the turn of our new boys, Kiwi and Machu Picchu. Kiwi is rather nervous and declined to take part but his brother decided that this looked interesting and investigated the scenery.
No. Don't eat the leaves, Picchu!
No, you cannot eat the pumpkin either. It is just a toy one.
But you can have some of that apple. Slave will cut the apples up and share them around in a minute.
After getting a cue from Binky chewing the willow twig tunnel... Cookie has gotten into an ardent attempt to eat the tunnel and she does it very vigorously! (Turn sound on!)
Our Slave has been away on holiday so her son came to house and pigsit. He took some photos on his phone so they are not as good as those from Slave's camera.
"Look!" says Kiwi," Our newspaper says that we are messy!" " That is odd. I thought that he had just cleaned out our pen." replies Machu Picchu in between mouthfuls of fresh grass.
" Don't worry." calls Fernando from next door. " That is not an indictment of the state of your pen. You have been given the sports pages and the article is about Lionel Messi, who is a famous footballer. The pigsitter has brought us some really good grass today."
This is Raani!
A few wheeks ago my slaves Mieke and daddy E went to see Dr. Pol at a dutch theatre.
You might know him as the incredible Dr. Pol and seen him while your slaves watch him on National geographic. What you might not know is that he was born in the Netherlands. So from his vet practice in Michigan, he came back to his home land and did a theatre tour.
Slaves say it was fun to watch him talk about all the animals he's seen and the things he experienced.
He did the show in Dutch as this is his mother tongue, which was odd, as slaves are used to seeing him speak English, but his dutch is still very good. Also his wife Diane manages to express herself very well in Dutch.
The first part of the show he would talk about his experiences and show videos of patients he's seen.
After the break everyone were told they would get to work and dr.Pol would 'see' some animals. All visitors to the show were asked to send in a picture of their pet with a question about them. Mommy thought this would be nice, and shared a pigture of me, and some x rays, and wanted to ask dr. Pol about my saddle back (a sagged back). It seems to be a rare thing in guinea pigs, we had never heard of that before it was found in me... It would be cool if my story was picked out of the entries!
So the break was over and consultation hour started...
And it was me on the screen! On the left you can see a miniature Dr. Pol and the hostess.
Mom was handed a microphone and told who I was and asked my question. It seemed he had not really heard about this saddleback in guinea pigs. He does know about it in horses, and asked if Raani had kids. Apparently this happens in animals that had kids, but Raani hasn't. He also said she is not a race horse and she can grow old with this and it should not bother her.
According to my vet it would cause (some) pain, so I am not sure now. Anyone here has any experience with guinea pigs and a saddle back?
Below you can see the video daddy E made of mom and Dr. Pol answering the question in dutch. If you want us to translate a bit, let us know! They are all laughing about dr.Pol saying she is not a race horse. At the end he says I am a pretty animal (mooi beestje) 😄.
Mummy and Daddy had a short break away from us recently, luckily they got to see some Capybara's with their babies so they didn't actually miss us too much. We made the most of them being away and had parties everyday shhhhhhh
Mummy saw this fun display at a local garden centre, while we think it looks great we also think they could have made this out of edible plants and flowers and then we could have sat at the table and eaten them.
Our Slave tried to take some photos of us being Curious Piggies like Mieke's. Unfortunately her camera makes a little "Click" before, a second later, off goes the flash. This Click is enough for us to hear it and run away resulting in lots of out-takes.
Here is one of Cosmo Dangermouse.
Then she tried bribery but this is not quite the photo that she was seeking although Cosmo did get an extra piece of cucumber.
Finally success ( of a kind ). It is lucky that Cosmo is white as the photo is a bit dark, for which she apologises. You can also see that he ate that piece of cucumber as his coat looks rather green under his chin.
Whenever Mummy and Daddy see a field like this they always think this is what Guinea Pig heaven must be like.
We don't have the heart to them that we think the bales are actually straw and that guinea pigs don't like that as it is sharp and can scratch our eyes.
