Spaghetti for the Ratties
The rat babies LOVE food! They go nuts over fruit, cheerios, and oatmeal, and I gave them whole wheat spaghetti with tomato/basil marinara sauce tonight for the first time. It seems like they really enjoyed it! Check out the pictures and see for yourself (sorry they’re a little out of focus…)
They also got a little bit of scrambled egg for breakfast yesterday, but they were less enthusiastic about it.
New Rat Cage!
I got a new cage for my boys yesterday. It’s a Marchioro Tommy K 102. I know I said I was building one, but it just wasn’t turning out the way I wanted it to. And when I found the Tommy cage it had everything I wanted. The base is really deep, so they can’t kick litter out. And it’s much longer and wider than the old cage. I think the dimensions are 40″x20″x20.5″high. So it’s about 4 inchces shorter than the old one, but the length and width more than make up for it. The cage calculator says it can hold 4 rats. Sometime in the future I may get 1 or 2 more, but not for a while. The two of them are enough work for now. I think it’s supposed to be a guinea pig cage because it came with a hay dispenser, which I laid flat in the cage as a little “house” for them to sleep under. It’s the clearish-blue thing over to the left. I also added the shelves from their old cage, the hammock, a large food dish they use as a shelf to sit on, and I got one of those half logs for them to play on and under. The towel pinned to the cage creates kind of a teepee over one of the shelves for them to sleep under. Here are the pictures:
Gerbil Picture
Here’s a cute pic of the gerbils sleeping cuddled up together from earlier this evening.
I was hoping to have the new rat cage built by now, but it’s taking a lot longer than I thought it would. I’m sure by the end of this weekend it’ll be ready for the boys to move in. The real advantage to the new one is that it’s a whole foot taller. I’ll have more room to add things like bird toys and ropes and other fun stuff. And the advantage for me will be that it’ll be a lot easier to clean and they won’t be able to kick litter out the sides of it. I’ll have lots of pics and a “how-to” on how i built it once it’s done.