it's okay to wander aimlessly through life

Wow, over two months since my last post o_O


It's weird to be writing in this blog again, but - like so many other of my late night posts - this one is inspired by putting The Triad to bed rather late and having some odd realizations while doing so.

Okay, some background: for the past two nights or so Sian has been having some issues eating her RMBs. It's not that she isn't eating, it's that when she does she screws it up. Granted, she's choked a bit on a particularly stringy piece of fat off the CGH pieces, but usually it's with the bone itself, which is why of dubbed the incidents The Bone Debacles. She'll get the bone situationed awkwardly in her mouth, scissor off too big of a piece or too small of one.

Something.

Then, the other night, in her attempt to undo something she had done (I still don't know quite what it was), she kept repeatedly hitting her parrot bell toy hung up in the cage. So I was hearing her coughing interspersed with the bright, peppy dingdingding of the toy.

It was...disconcerting.

What this whole story informs on is this: I was cutting up the RMBs for tonights dinner, when in one of the bowls I noticed a wicked looking thin bone. I immediately went over and started pulling this bone out of the lump of RMB. Halfway disconnected, I thought but this is the diet I feed my ferts, and I stopped trying to get that bit of bone out. Then I thought, but now I've called attention to it. If I leave it in now, they're obviously going to have some horrible accident.

So that bit of bone ultimately came out.

I know. Stupid. I've been feeding my guys raw for years, now. I've dealt with all kinds of food-related emergencies (choking and throwing up and obstructions, all that jazz). Generally, I'm comfortable feeding it to my guys, and (this may sound odd, but it's the truth), I love all the crunching and scissoring and slurping they do when they eat raw. It's the cutest thing.

But the actual mechanics of it - watching them eat, especially bone (which they need. If you absolutely CAN'T feed bone, do not feed a raw diet. It will harm your pet, trufax) - can be a scary thing.

I mean, if you want peeking-through-your-hands horror, watch a kit or newly transitioned fert attempt to eat a WING TIP. It will scar you and leave you babbling like an idiot. I am not kidding you.

What I've come to realize, too, is that in these instances, it's usually best to let them work out the issue (hacking up the food, getting the bone dislodged). If you stay calm, you can actually get them calm and then they figure out what exactly they need to do to get the damn thing out of their mouth :D Now, usually, when those situations arise (as they invariably do), my guys calmly hack until it's up and set about resizing it to fit (it's the rarer times when they'll get a bit frantic).

Pixie's the best about it - catching those trickier bones the first go round. She rarely has trouble, now, but The Twins tend to rush. They're bone aggressive, so they'll steal and fight over RMBs if I don't separate them and even when I do, they tend to try to eat as fast as they can to 1) rampage until they find someone else's to steal, and 2) keep anyone from rampaging and finding theirs.

Live and learn and then cover your eyes.

Also, belated Easter pics coming to a blog near you!

....eventually.