I haven’t written much about it, but our pet rats have been extremely time consuming recently. I think I only mentioned getting them here, then made a few posts on Instagram and Facebook. When we adopted them, Nora and Suzie were 5 weeks and Dollie was 7 weeks old.

A lot has changed since then. Long story short, ‘Suzie’ turned out to be a ‘Malakai’. The rattery offered to swap him out for a girl, but we felt bad about it. Not to mention, we assumed at least Nora or Dollie was already pregnant by that point. So we left them together and prepared to have some rat babies. We did a ton of research so we had an idea of what we were in for. Over time, you could really tell Nora and Dollie were both pregnant. I took pics to show their progression and notated a few things.

One note was that Nora literally looked like she was going to pop. The next morning, she had at least 15 babies. I could only tell that one didn’t survive. We kept an eye on things from afar, without disturbing her. We just wanted to make sure everything was going well. Later that day, Nora was right back on the move. But we had to be careful. She was a bit snippy if you got close to her babies.

A few days later, Dollie had her babies. She took longer to have hers. I’m not sure if she had some trouble, or was just taking a break. At one point, she seemed done and we counted eight babies. Next thing, there was at least 17! We had to wait a few days to actually count them. We couldn’t get anywhere near Dollie’s cage to do anything.

Our final count was 14 of Nora’s and 18 of Dollies. 32 rat babies total! Honestly from what I’ve read, I feel like we were really fortunate. I’ve read some horror stories and much smaller litters too. We have been taking Nora’s out when we can. Since Dollie gets extremely protective, we haven’t been interacting with hers as much. I hope to get some pics of Dollie’s later today.

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Nora’s Babies

I took tons of Nora’s babies, but here’s just a few to show how much they’ve changed over the days.

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