Aoife and Sammie

Meet my brother's new babies, Aoife and Sammie!

They are 2 female dwarf hamsters. Cute as cute can be! He got them on Monday and my kitty cat has yet to learn of their existence. Ha ha.

Aoife (pronounced EE-fa, Irish for beautiful, radiant, joyful) is a little chubby grey ball of fur with big black eyes. She's calm and cautious (a little afraid of climbing this tube thing that's part of the cage since it involves a bit of a fall to come down it). Very sweet.

Sammie is a little crazy. She's smaller than Aoife, white fur with tan patches and big RED eyes. The eyes were pretty freaky at first, but she's grown on us. She's a little more skittish than her sister, but is warming up to us... Sammie is definitely the jock of the pair. If given the chance, she'll spend the whole night running on the wheel (that made her stand out at the pet store!). I call her Psycho sometimes. The tube that Aoife's afraid of? Well, Sammie just flies up and down that thing. She's quite adventurous, always running, trying to climb the walls of the cage. If Aoife is running on the wheel, Sammie will stand next to it and try to run along wtih her front paws OR she tries jumping on and ends up flying off and landing on her back! She just bounces right back up and heads towards the wheel... She's a hoot.
(with flash)
Hopefully, we'll get some more cute pictures soon. I was telling my brother last night that I thought Aoife was a little bit of a bully. He said, "No, she's not!" The two animals would take turns running on the wheel. However, since Aoife is bigger, whenever she wanted to run, she just jumped on which makes the wheel stop and Sammie had to get off (since Sammie was too small to run with Aoife on). But then, once when I was watching, Aoife stopped running, so Sammie jumped on and started running. Er, I should say "attempted" to run. Aoife just sat there, in middle of the wheel and wouldn't budge. Sammie tried so hard to run. She even got it to turn a little bit which was really cute since you would see Aoife slide up and down the wheel, but still no budge. And I swear, Aoife didn't move for at least a minute or two. It was pretty funny..... But then apparently, Sammie got her revenge this morning. Whenever Aoife was getting ready to settle to sleep, Sammie would run over to where she was and pounce on her! Aoife's squealing freaked my brother out. So he says Sammie's the bully now.... So who's the dominant one? Guess we'll find out soon...