Rat Bellies!!
There’s a thread over at Goosemoose full of cute pudgy rat bellies. Here’s my rat babies’ bellies.
Pixel hammin’ it up:
Pica looking smug, he hates showing his belly:
Rat Nap
When I checked in on the rats this afternoon they were cuddled up and sleeping in their tunnel hammock. So cute. 
I managed to get my camera before they woke up. Here’s one of Pica sleeping with his tail curled up by his head.
And here they both are a few minutes later after the flash woke them up. The look on Pixel’s face says, “Hey, who do you think you are wakin us up?!?”
New Food for the Rats - Harlan Teklad 2014
I’ve heard such good things about Harlan Teklad, so I decided to go ahead and try them out. It comes in different varieties and levels of protien, but I got the 2014 which means it has 14% protein. Unfortunately you can’t just buy it from a pet store, so I ordered it from ColdBloods.com - a reseller. They were great, and it arrived in 2 days. The down side is that you have to order it in 33lb. shipments. That’s okay though, I just have a freezer full of extra food. And the price came out to 96cents per pound after the shipping was added in. Not bad! Mazuri was costing me $3 a pound at PetsMart.
Anyways, the rats love it! I put some in their bowl along with the Mazuri and some cheerios and pasta for dinner. Usually they grab the snacks, like cheerios, first, but tonight they were grabbing the Harlan! The best part was when Pixel tried to shove a cheerio, a pasta spiral, and a lab block all in his mouth at once and run away. He didn’t get very far, but I wish I had a camera. When I went back to check on them 2 hours later all that was left in their dish was Mazuri. So I’m definitely glad I switched.
As a side note, I’m going to try to switch the gerbils over to the Harlan too. They seem less excited about it, but I think it will be healthier than the all seed diet they’re on now. I may not get them totally switched, but a balance of seeds and blocks would help.
Rat Freerange Playtime
Freerange playtime is so important for the ratties. First because it’s great exercise. Rats can get big and squishy and overweight pretty easily, so letting them run around a little each day helps them stay in shape. But also they’re very curious animals. Being in a cage all day can get extremely boring for them, and when they’re bored they become destructive. By giving them some time to explore and use their brains they stay in a happy mood.
Here’s what I do to give my boys some time to play in a safe, enclosed area. Everyone does playtime differently, but this works best for me. I block off the kitchen and lay random “toys” around on the floor. You can see in the picture below how I block the doors off. I got 2 sheets of “hardboard” from the hardware store and then I prop heavy objects against them to keep them from moving. The toys are mostly just cardboard boxes, other empty containers, and things that roll around. They love to crawl and climb over (and under) everything - including me. They get to run around for about 45 minutes a night before going back to the cage for dinner. Here are the two pictures:
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.
Rattie Play Time Pictures
I finally got a new charger for my camera battery (yay!!) so I took a ton of play time pictures tonight. Unfortunately, they’re always on the run, so I only got about a half dozen good ones.
Also, when I was at Petsmart yesterday I picked up one of those kitty teaser toys, with a stick and some string on the end. Pixel was all over it!
Finally Pica warmed up to it - he was a little scared of it at first.
But mostly Pica likes to hide out in between the counter and the fridge.
He also likes to chill on my lap.
And finally, here’s one of Pixel trying to find my ear!
There will definitely be more rat pictures to come!