All Guinea Pigs, Live and Fluffy

In addition to having a parallel universe of stuffed dogs to match the real dogs in our house, there's a similar parallelism for guinea pigs. Yes, it's not enough to have six real, live guinea pigs in the basement; the boys must also have guinea pigs that they can hold at all times and in all places, and toward that end, between the two of them, they have two big stuffed guinea pigs and one baby-pig. The really amazing thing though is that, as with the dogs, they treat the stuffed creatures with all the seriousness and tenderness that they show the breathing, squealing cavies who live downstairs. I must say, the stuffed pigs are really darling. Almost as cute as the ones that live in cages, if you like guinea pigs (which, of course, we do).

Today, with everyone snow-bound, we starting running out of activities, and Ian decided we could hold the guinea pigs. Normally, that means we go to the basement and I chase down the pigs-of-choice from the cage and hand them off to their admirers and watch Daniel like a hawk to make sure he doesn't do anything ergonomically catastrophic to the guinea pig that he's holding. It also often means making a "leg cage" with Ian, where we sread out out legs and form an enclosure from them, to contain his pig-of-the-moment as it runs around the makeshift compound. And it often enough means me fishing out some terrified guinea pig from under the toy-chest with an openign small enough to provides the perfect escape for the cavy-on-the-run.

But not today. Today, we held the stuffed pigs, with all the intensity of holding their biological counterparts. And as of sometime earlier this week, the pigs have elegant bands of paper around their waste, one per pig, with ornate colorful scribbling on them, bound with tape. Ian explained to me that these were "jackets" to keep the (stuffed) pigs warm. The pigs also have been set into the cage with their bio-counterparts, so that when you looked in the cage, you saw stuffed decoys on the top ledge and the biological ones on the ground floor. (Luckily, it turns out that guinea pigs don't like to eat velveteen, or whatever it is, the way that they've been known to have a taste for the cellophane that comes with fresh vegetables.

In our house, a dog is a dog and a pig is a pig. We don't discriminate based on carbon or litter-output or respiration...