82 grams!

Right. So I was going to write about how Lada is doing better and his neck has been fine lately.

A few recent photos:

Looking sharp there. :-)

And tonight he actually fit a huge piece of carrot in his mouth. Never thought he would manage, he even struggled with it for long enough for me to get my camera out.

The magic moment:

And he had a run around the living room for almost an hour tonight, all was well!

Until I weighed him. He's down to 82 grams now!!! He's around 10 months old and most definitely should weigh more than that!

But otherwise he seems fine.

Much the same

These pictures are from last night. He's better again now, I think, so I don't know what's going on…

He seems as healthy as he's ever been, eating his new food and drinking his vitamin-enhanced water. Still a little less hairy in the neck area than elsewhere, but not as bad as two weeks ago.

Gotten worse?

So I'm not too thrilled about this. Tonight I had the impression that Lada's neck has gotten worse again. It is really hard to tell, but it seemed to me like his neck fur is thinner again.

Tonight's picture:

Of course he is leaning forwards in this photo, so it's more obvious then. But even with that taken into consideration…

I will not be terribly surprised if there's another trip to the vet in the not-too-distant future.

Update on Lada's neck

So this is Lada's neck tonight:

You can still see that his fur isn't entirely normal in the neck area. But he still hasn't got any worse, so I guess maybe the new food and the vitamin supplements are helping.

Unless he turns up hairless some evening soon… It happened very suddenly last time, so might do so again!

Warm weather

We're in the middle of a heatwave and have had temps above +30 every day for a week. Tonight the forecast says it'll hit +34 C, which is close to the all-time heat record in the country!

Lada is hot. In fact, he's so hot that he's currently sleeping with his butt outside of his house! LOL!

Very light-weight...

I weighed Lada tonight, to see how he's getting on with the Oxbow Essentials food. Tonight he only weighed 96 grams. That's 10 grams down from the 104 he clocked a month ago (June 6).

Apparently, though, it's normal for a hamster's weight to fluctuate with as much as 1-12 grams, so I don't really worry yet. I only worry about the fact that he's so small, but I guess he's just built that way.

Little Lada's neck

Tonight's pictures:

In the top and bottom photos you can kind of make out a circle in the fur on his neck. This is the area where he went bald before. It's getting hard to tell if you don't know what you're looking for, so I would definitely say he's getting better.

Looks like the vitamins in his drinking water is helping. He hasn't eaten a lot of the new food yet, he is getting a mix of old and new and seems to prefer the old. But it'll still be a couple of weeks before his feed is completely changed over.