So, as I mentioned earlier, I have to say goodbye to Amex and Max for a while. They’re in good hands–they’re both with their original owner; I was only their co-owner. I’ll be visiting them often and will be sent pictures of them. I’ll still post about them on Snuzzy whenever I can. By a strange coincidence, they may actually be moving to the same city I’m in depending on an as of yet undecided decision by a giant corporation that owns their owner’s boss. Pets! So complicated!

Anyway, before I left I wanted to get a group shot of them all together, but it didn’t go so well. Mainly because Amex is a cat who not only does not like to be held, she also doesn’t like to be held up against a spikey hedgehog.

That last picture kind of looks like I’m trying to get Amex to “stop making a scene” in front of company.

But never fear! There are tons of cute animals where I’m staying now. I only got pictures of a few–a cat named Fuzzface (sigh, I didn’t name her) and a smelly dog named Wyatt, pictured with my littler brother, who also smells. I’ll post pictures of the others as I get them:

When I posted this video of me giving my hedgehog a bath I got a bit of guff from the YouTube nuts. A few non-hedgehog owners insisted that hedgehogs are naturally clean and don’t need baths and that bathing a hedgehog is abuse. Any hedgehog owner’s reaction to that would be: “I wish!”

Hedgehogs are so far from being naturally clean. Their favorite hobbies are running, pooping and digging. Hedgehogs can get really dirty really fast and you should bathe them every few weeks using ‘no tears’ baby shampoo to keep them healthy and happy. Otherwise they’ll be susceptible to bacteria that can make them sick. They also really enjoy baths–it’s the least spiky you’ll ever see them. Sometimes I’ll give Max a quick rinse in the water just to calm him down.

And the best part of giving Max a bath is that he looks SO CUTE and snug drying off in his facecloth:

Usually at our house whenever we watch certain girly reality shows like Top Model or Project Runway, we invite a lot of people over because it sort of eases the embarrassment? Anyway, we typically end up ordering chicken, and we also usually ended up bringing Max out and giving him a box to sit in, and feed him little bits of chicken. (It may seem cruel to put him in a box, but he’s a mole, and he loves dark places, if you put him on the table with a box, he’ll willingly crawl into it). Though he’s a total lap-hedgehog, and sometimes he’ll just sit with us. Like this:

Anyway, girly reality show chicken is sort of a tradition we used to do with him when we lived in New York, as you can see here with him, as you can see in these videos:

We’re getting settled into our new place, but we finally decided to take Max out for a test drive (currently our coffee table is a box of CDs) putting in him a shelf from a jewelry box he used to sleep in when he was little. Here’s his reaction to the chicken:

And here’s Amex’s reaction to Max:

So, obviously, we had no choice but to give him his traditional reality show chicken:

After the generally positive response to the first Max Cuteness: Introduction, we decided to do Max Cuteness again! This week I’m going to show some videos of when Max was a baby (which was only a few months ago) to catch you up on his cuteness. I’ll film new videos soon!

Hi, Snuzzy readers! From now on I’m going to be doing posts every Friday about my hedgehog, Max. Unless you hate him, then I’ll stop! It’s called “Max Cuteness” and it’s going to be a lot of fun!

Let me start off by telling you a little about Max. He was born in late 2008 and we got him in early 2009 at a pet store in Long Island. He was the only hedgehog they had there that would actually open up and play with people, and wasn’t just a spiky hissy ball. Having owned several spiky hissy balls in the past, I thought this was pretty unique.

In nature hedgehogs eat insects, in captivity they can eat “insectivore food” or you can order hedgehog food specifically made by breeders. You can also feed them low fat catfood or store-bought hedgehog food, but it’s not the best for them. Grains are less nutritious for hedgehogs but cheaper to produce, and are often slipped into store-bought hedgehog food in disproportionately large quantities. Max likes to eat, but he likes to exercise more. While moving, Max had to stay in a smaller cage for a while, and he couldn’t use his wheel. Since then he’s gotten kind of fat.

But we got him a bigger cage and a new wheel and he’s working on shedding the pounds ounces!