A Chinchilla Christmas

Christmas is all wrapped up for us. The only thing left to do is take the garbage and recycling to the SRC and dump the tree out in the backyard. The poor tree! You can just about snap its branches because it's that dry. We watered it and everything, but it's had a hard life of cats and chinchillas running through it.

We celebrated Christmas on Christmas Eve as I was traveling to see family yesterday. I was overly excited to share my first Christmas with Nimbus! Which means that I was not above taking Christmas pictures with him! The photo below was taken with him sitting inside a Santa hat. The mini hat was placed on his head via Photoshop. The cuteness kills me!

Christmas Nimbus

To Sparta the cat, it was just another day, which happened to include a bunch of paper on the floor. To Nimbus, it truly was Christmas!

As presents, Nimbus received a dietary health supplement and some treats, both created by Oxbow, a company I've trusted for years. As soon as the wrapping was off, I handed him one of the dietary supplement biscuits, and he took off with it to a place of safety, nibbling furiously. After finishing his treat, Nimbus was all over the place - playing with my gifts, dashing through the wrapping paper, chewing on Sparta's new scratching post. He was allowed to roam freely and participate like the family member that he is in our celebrations on Christmas Eve morning. Talk about mental and physical stimulation. He thoroughly enjoyed scrabbling in the crinkled wrapping paper and jumping in the boxes. I think my boyfriend was a little put off by the fact that I wasn't paying attention to the gift unwrapping because I was took enthralled in the hilarious antics of Nimbus. It almost makes me want to go to the store, buy more presents, wrap them and start all over again with a second Christmas Eve morning to watch Nimbus play.

Then, Nimbus grew naughty! As I was taking items out of my "stocking," really a paper bag, I heard a  strange rustling sound from the kitchen. Now, it's not unusual to hear a strange rustling noise when owning a chinchilla, particularly Nimbus. He is a naughty little critter with no bounds to how far he'll go with his mischief. When the rustling continued, I walked to the kitchen and immediately whispered to Chris to bring the camera.

Nimbus had burrowed into an open kitchen drawer and was in the process of exploring every utensil and measuring cup he saw. Rattling, banging and scratching erupted from this drawer as the chinchilla made his way through a maze of chewable plastic. After a photo was snapped, I began to pull the drawer out. Nimbus saw this as an invitation to crawl deeper into the drawer until everything but his tail disappeared into the darkness.
"Um, is there a way for him to get down back there? Like can he jump over the edge?" Chris asked.
I nodded. "Mm, yep. He could."
Thankfully, Nimbus found the height too much and came forward. As I reached for him, he bounced away and out of the drawer, landing on the linoleum kitchen floor with a plop and skittered into his cage. Chris moved to close the cage door while I stared down at the drawer of dishes.
"What's the matter?" Chris asked.
I continued to stare and shivered. All I could see were utensils tainted with chinchilla footprints. "We're going to have to wash all of these," I said. "Every single one!"

We're going to need to wash some dishes!