Introducing Our New Pet, Holly the Hedgehog!

Happy Tuesday friends!

The GGR family officially has a new mascot; our new Pinto hedgehog Holly. She is 3 months old, and is way more fun than I would have imagined a tiny little bush-bacon could be. I decided to get her as a kind of pick me up after Harvey and so far that has been a complete success, both for myself and for Amy. I am used to having very labor/attention intensive pets, whether it is the dogs or the various aquariums I have had over the last 5 years. My only frame of reference for a hedgehog was the blue and incredibly fast kind created by Sega, and a girl I dated in high school who had one, but she let it wander around her house all the time so we could rarely find it. So we set off on this new pet adventure shortly after Thanksgiving not really knowing what to expect.

We should have expected a lot of cuteness

        We found a breeder in north Houston and did our research. Did you know that hedgehogs are actual pigs? Tiny little pricklepigs. I always thought they were rodents. We bought her a 2 story habitat, with the top part housing her bed, food and water, and the bottom part full of wood shavings that she can crawl around in.

It’s an easy way to keep her from getting shavings or droppings in her food and water while still being able to have the ability to burrow and scrounge around like she would in the wild. So far I would say she spends about 60% of her time down in the bottom either running on her wheel (she freaking loves that thing) or looking for the dried meal worms we hide down there for her to find.

Example, she loves finding those worms. They are like hedgehog crack.

        We also have a heater down there for her, which she likes to sleep next to when it is cold, however as it warms up she is spending more and more time up in her dino bed. Speaking of, I’m sure you already know by now but I love dinosaurs, and the fact that I found a small mammal bed designed to look like a dinosaur (or an alligator if you wanna go that way, but don’t, because why would you do that?)

If they made one big enough this would be my new bed

        The one thing I wasn’t prepared for though, after all of our research and reading, was how much personality and expression Holly would have. I have grown up my whole life with dogs, so the idea of an expressive pet is something you would think I would be used to. The tail wagging, the barking, the yipping, even how they walk means you can tell at any given moment how your dog is feeling. With a hedgehog, I assumed all of that would be out the window and I would have to just do my best to figure out what she was feeling in a given time. Looking back now this is almost laughable. There is the obvious, if she is really pissed off she will ball up and point her spines at you (another fun fact I learned YESTERDAY is that hedgehogs have spines, not quills). So that is a pretty blatant fuck off. When she is happy, she will have her spines down and will be visibly relaxed, and that is where the cuteness factor is cranked up to 11. But there are so many variations in between. She will hiss when she is annoyed. She will pull down her face spines and give you the most pissed off grumpy face imaginable. When she is completely content, especially if you are feeding her, she will almost visibly smile. She can be playful and she can be mischievous.

Overall, we got her as a fun little project to help pick us up after the hurricane, but she has quickly endeared herself to everyone in our family. Pretty much the first thing that people ask when they come over these days are “can we see Holly?” She is quickly becoming the most popular member of our family, which is saying something considering how popular Amy is. No jealousy yet though. Side note- guys and gals, if you are single and looking for a way to meet people, get a hedgehog. I have never picked up more interest online or in person that when people see a cute hedgehog face poking out of your pocket, and this is coming from someone who was going through my early 20’s with a golden retriever puppy. My Instagram followers basically doubled the first time I tagged her in a post. I also realize how millennial and attention whorish that sentence just sounded and kind of hate myself right now but facts are facts. Holly’s got that star power.

That’s all I have for today, I’m sure there will be plenty of pictures of her popping up around here as time goes on. We also have our Instagram and Twitter scrollers as sidebars on here. Thanks for reading, next up we are going to have our first bullet journal progress update. I’ve gotten a ton of good feedback on that post and am looking forward to showing how that is impacting our lives. Have a great west of the week my geeks!

-CDL