Has it really been a year...?

Yesterday mum, Grace and I went to the graveyard to put flowers on my grandparents grave. We couldn't quite believe it has been a whole year since Granny Ross died, it has really flown by.
It was a nice enough day, not sunny but it was calm and the view across Larne Lough was lovely. Grace enjoyed the trip, she carried a pot plant and put it on the grave all by herself. It was a nice trip, good to see the new headstone in place and the grave looking so neat now we've had the stones replaced and the surround cleaned. For anyone visiting from Down the Lane, please note that the conifer is tiny and in a pot!!

Not blogging much....

I've been very lazy about my blogging this month. This is mainly due to being off work with a dodgy disc in my lower spine - I find I can write better in work at a proper PC than I do at home on my laptop. Also the office I work int he majority of the time is in a nice quiet part of the building and mostly of all there is no trace of children's television!!!!
There is nothing much to report with the leopard geckos. DeeDee is fat and pissed off, much like any heavily pregnant female. I am currently planing how to convert 2 shelves of a bookcase into 2 vivariums so they can be separated - I'm worried about DeeDee getting stressed and think she needs her own space. I think I'll blog that separately as it's a big job and I think if I write it all down it'll help me get it clear in my head.
I will definitely be blogging more regularly now my back is all better!!

First shed

Since the geckos came along, my morning routine has changed somewhat. The wait til grace wakes/change nappy/get back into bed together and roll around tickling each other for half an hour while watching Balamory on iPlayer is still pretty much unchanged. but now when we head downstairs, I do not check my emails with a leisurely coffee (milk and 2 sugars for future reference) No, as soon as Grace is munching her cereal I do Egg Check. I go into the viv, gently check all the hides and nooks and crannies to see if DeeDee has laid. Then I try to tempt her to eat a waxworm as a treat because I don't think she is eating much at the moment.
This morning I was excited because Mo has been coming up to shedding his skin. Last night just before bed he looked very white, and I could see a tiny hole in the old baggy skin under his leg - you can just see it in the first photo behind his front leg.
This morning when I looked to see how he was doing, and he looked like a hoodie!!
He was NOT in a good mood so I popped his hide back and left him to it. A further check an hour or so later and he only had his tail left to go, and my dinner time just one foot. By bedtime he still has skin stuck on half a toe so I got a cotton bud soaked in water and helped him ease it off. Am now very proud of both myself and Mo - first big gecko event went very smoothly for both of us! Now it's back to egg watch........

New pets

I have become the very proud owner of 2 very beautiful leopard geckos. Believe it or not I got them for free on freecycle!
I had been looking into getting some kind of lizard for a while. Considering how badly I got it wrong with Rocky, I wanted to really do my homework and be all set up and ready before actually getting the lizard. After a lot of reading I settled on a leopard gecko. So I put a wanted ad on freecycle to see if anyone had any spare bits and bobs like heat mat or bits of wood etc. for decorating their vivarium. To my surprise a lady emailed offering me a vivarium - complete with occupants. She said Echo (the gecko) and Lizzie (the lizard) were a pair of 1 year old females. So the following day, Grace and I tapped the postcode into the satnav and went on our jollies to Tandragee - a journey of around 50 miles. It was not the most comfortable journey for me, my back had been achey from early January and had taken a definite turn for the worse the day before. When I finally arrived I was barely able to walk and getting worried about how I was going to get a vivarium into the back of the car!

The lady, also called Sarah, was lovely though. She brought the viv (only small, about 1ft by1ft) out to the car for me and helped me get it all strapped in. Another 50 mile + drive home, then a stop at the pet shop to order a new viv (a 2 foot one) and I was done!! I couldn't even drive any more so my dad took me to pick up the new viv later in the afternoon plus some crickets etc. for them.
So, over the past week we've re-named them Mo and DeeDee. We have discovered that Mo is a boy and DeeDee is a girl, and guess what? Yes, DeeDee is pregnant! So we have installed a nesting box of damp vermiculite int he viv in the hope that she'll lay a few fertile eggs and start a family. That's DeeDee on the left, she's paler because she's a Bell's Albino. My big boy Mo is a normal and slightly bigger than DeeDee