It’s about halfway through the month and all I’ve been doing is updating the baby guinea pig’s weights and taking a few snapshots here and there to post to Instagram and Twitter.

The babies are over 300 grams and have learned how to fight. I put them in the carrier while I was cleaning the pig pen, and they got stressed out and started to battle. I had to towel them and then leave them in the living room floor with Dismal, in their playpen.

The cage won’t be big enough for long.

In anticipation of creating a bigger cage, I got an obscene amount of bath towels on Craigslist for $25 that I can lay under a sheet of fleece, and use for bedding.

We haven’t had any major behavioral problems with the boys and the guinea pigs recently. They want to touch them but there are no sudden movements. The babies are still small enough that I wouldn’t want the boys to get back in the pig pen, so the lid remains on. When they are big enough to take the lid off, I’ll be making the pig pen larger and then if the boys want to go hang with the piggies, they can again.

Part of Tommy’s disappointment with having the guinea pigs locked up is that he no longer has access to their supply of hay. There is still a part of me that doesn’t know if I can trust him when the babies reach 2 months of so, but his exposure to guinea pigs has been ongoing since he was a kitten and the smallest one I’d had was no larger than about a 3 month old… so he’s done this before. The only difference is that he’s actually tasted a guinea pig now.

My parents visited. Dad helped me rebuild the walls of the pig pen because the grid spacing I’d had was 8, while other grids I had used to construct the lid and the other temporary pen had a spacing of 9, making the holes in the grids smaller and then a guinea pig can’t get their smaller baby head stuck.

I want to seem more involved with my cats, but nothing has really changed with them and everything in the world has changed with my guinea pigs. The birds are still doing well; occasionally eating french fries and always giving kissies. And, everyone flocked to my parents: The birds, the cats, and mom played with the guinea pigs.

I suppose I should weigh the cats again and see how the boys’ progress is going. I don’t know that I would keep going on this diet into 2016, even if Tommy doesn’t reach his goal weight. He’s been on Metabolic since August 2013. Stewart joined him in April 2014.