Why Do Our Guinea Pigs Live In the Bathroom?

If I was reading my own blog posts, and sadly, I am, and I ran across the one that admitted that our guinea pigs live in the bathroom, I would be very perplexed.

So here it is, real life.

When my oldest son Henry lost his second hamster in three years, not to any fault of his own, we decided we needed a game plan. Perhaps, something that lived longer would be a bit better - so we weren't devolving into tears and digging a hole in the backyard once a year. After all, he was responsible, and took good care of the little guys, we just weren't having a ton of luck keeping them alive.

So as responsible parents, we did some research, and Henry did it with us. We looked at reptiles, we considered rodents that live longer, like rats, but in the end, we settled on guinea pigs - no tails win-win :).

If you have a messy house and a ton of kids, don't get Guinea Pigs.

It worked for us though, or so I thought. Emily was getting to the age of responsibility and she could have the second guinea pig. They could clean up and care for them together, and guinea pigs are pretty interactive, too. They'd have fun.

So here is how it happened.

I found a pair of guinea pigs to adopt - Yay! From a mom, not too far from us, her kids were allergic, apparently. She posted a picture of their perfectly manicured cage, and they even came with food, supplies, and a hand vac to keep everything clean. What a Win!

I reached out to the mom, explained our situation and we clicked -- either that, or she was desperate to get the little buggers out of her house, I would've been -- so we set up a time and date to meet, a couple of days later. Our family had a tummy bug running through it at that time and I wanted to make sure we were all better before meeting her.

Intermission - the tummy bug landed my daughter, Emily in the hospital unexpectedly (I'll share more about that later).

A very long story short, during this timeframe we found out that Emily would be in the hospital for a minimum of six weeks. If you could imagine, our whole house was disrupted and our 3 other children felt that stress.

So crazy mom, trying to be the good mom, went ahead with the adoption - we just pushed it out a few days. Henry was told that he would care for both of them while Emily was away. (Yeah, let's add something other than deathly ill daughter to our to-do list - sometimes I wonder what the heck I was thinking).

One of the very rare mornings when I woke up at home during the hospital stay, (Hal and I made sure that someone was always with Emily, save when we had to go to the cafeteria to eat), I put the cat carrier in the car and drove out to get these rodents.

The other mom had it all packed up for me, except the gleaming cage which was still perfectly clean. She warned me that the piggies pooped when they were nervous, so not to worry if I got home and their bed was full of little pellets. Then she waved bye to the piggies, shut the door to her house and did a victory dance on the other side of it, (I bet she actually did). Some other sucker had her piggies now.

When I got home, what she had predicted had come true. The little piggies had made quite a big mess in their bed. Thirty, fourty, poop pellets - I was rushed, I didn't count them, were there and the piggies were super nervous.

I moved all of the pieces of their cage upstairs to our office, It wouldn't be fair for them to live in just one of the kids' rooms and guinea pigs have to live together. I painstakingly put together the delicate pieces of the cage - it's a wire thing with those little plastic connectors that fall apart if you touch them wrong, so it required several tries - then I put the piggies in. It looked just like when I picked it up from the other mom, well, except the 20 additional poop pellets - how on earth do they hold that much poop?

The kids initial excitement was great - I even added a ring camera so Emily could see what they were doing while she was in the hospital. Things stayed relatively clean, but we were beginning to have a problem. Timothy Hay, which is what the piggies eat the most of, loves going strait through cage bars and stick into carpet. So does piggy poop. Actually, as it happened, the little hump in the carpet between the baseboard and where the carpet naturally piles was full of poop.

We tried everything, hand brooms, hand vacs, regular vacuums, shop vacs (with earphones for the kids) and the hay clogged absolutely everything. Alas, the guinea pigs got moved to the only place upstairs without carpet. A hallway style bathroom where the tile can be swept, and the door locked against our smaller kids.

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Kristian is a mom of six, Program Manager by day, active Professional Photographer by trade, and a big believer in finding beauty in the everyday chaos.

Life in our house is loud, messy and full of literally everything. Love, noise, laundry, laughter, and definitely could use a bit more grace. I'm happily married to my best friend, grounded in my Catholic faith, and fueled by five to six hours of sleep per night and adrenaline.

I try to find joy in the everyday — even when it's wild, because without the little bit of joy, this life would be unbearable. This space is for the moms in the middle of it all: the ones juggling family, faith, work, and wonder. The ones that need someone else's messy life to make their own seem better or somewhat normal. You're not alone, and you're doing better than you think.

Welcome to Six Sweet Smiles — where we celebrate the mess, the miracles, and everything in between.