Introducing Gojou

We are the proud parents of a little baby boy hedgehog! Meet Gojou:

Seeing him for the first time at the Japanese pet store called PetBox. We had to order him special since they were all out of little hejjihoggu's. A friend of mine got a hedgehog a few months ago and a few weeks ago Brad finally came around to wanting to get a pet. Since we live in the towers we can only have caged animals (no dogs or cats). I miss my little yorkie and having a pet in the house, so I was so excited when Brad said I could have a hedgehog.

The hedgehog ended up being a lot more than we thought we would spend! But, since he was a baby and ordered special I guess that's what we get. Gojou is a month old and was born on Oct 20. Brad's Japanese skills came in really handy during this process because we kept having to go by the store and make calls.

Brad putting together his lil home. He is an omnivore and eats insects, fruit, veggies and we found out he really enjoys chocolate (see video below). At the store they were feeding him ferret food in milk (like cereal). The green box is the stuff they were using to line his cage at the store.

These are pictures from his first night home 2 days ago. I am totally in love!

He is so teeny. He is also very sleepy. He sleeps all the time, such a little baby. Well, the first night he didn't sleep much. This little Houdini escaped from his cage! He some how managed to get himself out through the bars of his cage and wandered around the apartment all night long. Brad woke up early for work and saw he wasn't in his cage and started looking for him. He couldn't find him, so he woke me up to help look. I tore the apartment apart looking for him. No luck. I was terrified that he somehow got himself stuck somewhere, that he hurt himself or that I'd never see him again. We kept looking and after about 45 minutes (that's a long time the apartment isn't that big), we saw that the couches had some rips in the fabric on the bottom from our many many moves. We started turning the couches over to see if he maybe burrowed up into one. We found him in the third couch in the living room, balled up sleeping soundly. He was perfectly fine and pretty annoyed about being woken up in his warm comfy spot. I burst into tears when we found him, he made me so worried! We added a soft cloth to his cage that he likes to sleep under and he didn't get out last night. I hope he likes his cage and wants to stay in it. I didn't really like cleaning up all the spots of green baby hedgehog poop I found in random spots around the apartment after his night out. Silly baby.

This is my favorite picture so far. My little ball of joy. The internet translator told us that his name means Joy. But, I've asked a few Japanese people and they don't know what Gojou means and when I say joy, they don't know what joy is either... so not sure. But, to us his name means Joy and he already brings me so much joy!

This video is from tonight. He got into my shirt pocket all by himself. He loves to burrow and get snuggled. I was eating a mini dark chocolate leftover from Halloween and he smelled it, woke up and turned around with his little nose going. I bit off a little bit for him and he really loved it. He only got the little bit shown in the video, I'm thinking chocolate is probably not great for baby hedgehogs. I've tried giving him bread, turkey, lettuce, kiwi and provolone cheese. This is the first thing he's liked. He does like his baby formula milk stuff and it's super cute to watch him eat.