This is perfect timing for a crested gecko update. Lots has been going on with my little colony of geckos, so I have plenty to share. First up is Jade. As some of you may know, Jade has been dropping a lot of weight and I took her into the vet. Things aren’t looking super great. She’s incredibly skinny. So the vet gave me some medication to give her as well as told me to house her in an enclosure separate from the breeding group. So I’ve got her all separated and started on the medication. I really am hoping to see some major improvement over the next couple weeks. Other than her scary weight loss, Jade is still her usual self. She continues to growl at me; one of the vet techs even commented on it. Jade is also still very mobile and active. I am praying that my sassy gecko gets better. To continue with the breeding group, I’ll update you on Zoey next. Just last Saturday Zoey laid her first clutch of eggs! I am so excited. So my breeding group has now produced two clutches. I am super excited to get some more eggs. Zoey is still her sweet chill self, and she is a total chunker. She is my largest gecko and weighs in at about 52 grams. I love her and am looking forward to getting more eggs from her. Hazel is the last female in the breeding group. She laid her clutch of eggs about a month ago which means she could lay another clutch anytime now. She’s still such a pretty dark brown color and isn’t a huge fan of being held. Just the other night I actually caught her mid shed. It was pretty cool to watch her finish the shed and I even saw her eat some of it! It was a really cool experience. Last up is Saturn. Saturn has been very active as the breeding season gets into full swing. It’s been fun to watch him with the females. He’s actually quite a funny gecko. If he’s being held by someone besides me, he sort of searches for me and then jumps onto me if possible. I think it’s a cute little quirk. Norbert, my very first gecko, is getting so big! He’s growing really well and I can’t believe the difference from when I first got him. Norbert has really been enjoying the crickets. He is the only gecko that will consistently eat them for me. He loves them and I love watching him hunt for them. He’s still pretty small though. I can’t wait for him to continue to grow. Sunflower is also growing really quickly. She seems to get more and more spots everyday and is turning out to be quite a pretty gecko. I’ve recently been finding her in the humidity hide/lay box I have in her enclosure, so I think she’s really been enjoying that since I added it a couple weeks ago. Brookelle has suddenly gotten much bigger! She seems closer to being an adult now rather than a juvenile. So I think it’s pretty safe to say she is a female. She is also developing a darker brindle pattern that is seriously gorgeous. I can’t wait for her to become an adult. Skywalker is one of my favorite geckos pattern wise. His colors are just so bright and beautiful. They seem to get more defined and pretty every day. He’s pretty active and can always be found chilling in the egg carton I have in his enclosure. I can’t wait to see if he ends up being a male or female. Either way his babies are gonna be so cool! This post is also well timed because I’ve gotten another gecko! But this is my last one I swear! I had been checking this gecko out at petco for WEEKS. I kept going back and debating him. So I finally got him! I named him Macchiato. He’s this really pretty dark and light brown brindle that makes me think of coffee, hence the name. He’s so tiny but a really awesome addition. And that’s all folks! I am still obsessed with all my geckos and am stoked to dive into the breeding season!! As a bonus here’s an update on my cats. Weasley is now full grown and I can’t believe how big he’s gotten. He’s a chunk and come running when he hears the treats shake. So I’m using that to my benefit. I am slowly, very slowly, working on teaching him some tricks. It’s been fun and once he masters them I’ll be sure to take a video of it! Binks is still super sneezy and we love it; sorta. We give him treats with a special protein that is supposed to help the irritation in his nose, they seem to work okay, but he still has sneeze attacks. Since we’ve moved Binks seems to be more playful and doesn’t hide under the couch as often, hopefully this sticks! We also have adopted a new cat! I know I’m crazy, leave me be. We named her Amidala. She is the SWEETEST cat there is. I adore her so much and she is truly beautiful. She’s got dark grey fur with some coloration of orange and light grey and black. She already seems to be the queen of the apartment. One thing that I’ve really enjoyed is that she runs to greet me at the door whenever I get home. It’s like having a dog-cat. She also loved the car ride home and wanted to look out the window. I adore each and every animal I have and each has a special place in my heart. Thanks for reading!
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Bullet Journals are a hot topic right now, and it seems like everyone has one. Well I’m a part of this bandwagon. And that’s okay! You don’t need to feel bad about being “basic”, an idea that I recently read about and one I want to embrace. I love being basic at times and my bullet journal is one of those times.
I’ve attempted to start bullet journaling several times. The most recent of startups was around August of last year. Well that journal quickly turned into an unorganized mess. For some people that’s totally okay and the point of having a bullet journal, but for me organization was the whole reason of having a journal so I restarted. At the beginning of March I got a new journal and started fresh and I can honestly say I’m pretty proud of the results. Now I plan on videoing my bullet journal for the vlog so I don’t want to spoil too much. Instead I’ll just describe my layout and get you excited to actually see the layouts in the video. At the very beginning of my journal I have a little round design with hello beautiful in it. Next page is my year at a glance, then my 2018 bucket list. On the next page is my list of birthdays and finally I have a spread of savings goals for the year. That concludes all my introductory pages. After those I have my weekly trackers. I have it set up so at the beginning of each month there’s a calendar and a budget to stick to. Then follows my weekly pages. On those I have work shifts written, a spot for what's for dinner, and a spot for workouts. Then at the end of all the days, is a tracker that I use to keep track of water, food, the gym, wearing my watch, blog posts, and vlog posts. That pretty much sums up my weekly spread. Now these are exactly my most exciting pages, but they make me feel so organized and successful. After all my weekly spreads, I have a section dedicated to my geckos. Yes an entire section. This is one I feel really proud of and can’t wait for you to see in the video. I’ve got a list of all my geckos, a breeding group page where I can write when cluthces are laid, then I’ve got a page to keep track of sheddings. The next page is dedicated to writing down the dates of cricket and banana feedings. Then there’s an emtpy page that will be used to write down when clutches hatch and how the hatchlings look. After that each gecko has a page where I write down their biweekly weights. Then to finish off my bullet journal I have a simple monthly lists of what blog and vlog posts I’m going to post. I feel like my descriptions aren’t very good but I’m really excited to film and want you guys to check that out. So sorry for the photoless post, just think of it as a teaser for what's to come! I wanted to write up this post to share how I have my geckos’ enclosures decorated. This topic has been on my mind for a while. As I’ve gotten enclosures set up for each of my geckos I’ve ran into the issue of money. If you go to a pet store and check out the reptile section you’ll see shelves and shelves of rocks and fake plants and humidity hides. But man they are super expensive! And as you know, I’m a young adult, newly married, and going to college, so that means I don’t have money to spare. Well with six enclosures to fill I had to come up with a solution, and quick. That's what has brought me here. I wanted to share how to make safe, nice, and cheap items for your gecko’s enclosure. I have experimented and have found some good cheap alternatives to tank decor. First up is the use of fake plants. While it’s important to make sure the plants are safe for your geckos (ie no small fake berries or other items that could break off) that doesn’t mean they have to be expensive. In fact almost every plant I have for my geckos are from the dollar store. I’ve gotten mostly leafy vines as they are easy to bend and wrap around other objects. Next trick I use is brooms. Yes you read that right, brooms. When I adopted my breeding group they came in an enclosure that wasn’t set up properly. It had fine sand as a substrate and tree branches that were starting to mold because of the humidity. Well the day after I brought them home, I completely emptied the 40 gallon tank, wiped it out, and filled it back up. I’m pretty proud of the difference. However since I had to take the molding logs out, I’ve felt guilty because my geckos lost a large amount of climbing space. I pondered for a long time for an alternative as the fake logs from the pet store just weren’t in my budget. One day when I was browsing the dollar store (one of my favorite things to do) I ran across some brooms in their cleaning section. The handle of these brooms got me thinking that I could unscrew the actual broom and stick the handle diagonally across the breading group’s enclosure. I figured why the heck not, it’s just a dollar (probably why my dollar store trips usually add up to way too much) and took them home. Unfortunately the brooms were just slightly too long to fit. I was totally bummed, but I didn’t let that stop me. I took out the pliers and bent the broom until it broke. Then I sanded and wrapped the broken end in electrical tape. This was a perfect solution! They work really well and the geckos love climbing on them. I have also heard from many other gecko lovers that PVC pipe works really well as well. I think I’m going to try that out for my smaller enclosures. Another recommendation I’ve read lots about is using egg cartons and toilet/paper towel rolls. These are working out great! I’ve gotten some egg cartons from the daycare I work at and have saved up enough paper towel rolls that each enclosure has one. This fills them up really well and gives plenty of hiding space for all my geckos. My last hack for the gecko enclosures was the humidity hide/lay box. This is a very important feature in your gecko’s enclosure, especially if they are breeding. Well I really couldn’t afford a humidity hide for each enclosure, so I improvised. I pulled out the super old and cheap plastic tupperware set Tyler and I bought over a year ago when we first moved in together. It’s really flimsy plastic and didn’t hold up well, but for some reason we kept it. What's perfect about this tupperware is that it came in a couple different shapes and sizes. I used the rectangular ones to create my humidity hides. The breeding group got two big ones and the rest got smaller ones. First I washed them, then took an exacto knife and cut along the grooves in the lid to create an opening. When that was smooth around the edges, I filled the box with some moss that had originally came in the breeding groups’ enclosure. Then ta da! Plenty of cheap humidity hides. All these are just suggestions on how to create a safe and full enclosure for your crested gecko, while the expensive store bought items can be nice and look cool, you can easily save money and make the enclosure look just as nice. If you have any other ideas on how to diy items for my geckos I’d love to hear! I want to start off this post by apologizing for my recent slacking off of posting. I have had a couple weeks of bad day after bad day. And I’m a real person and so this is really hitting me hard making me unmotivated to post. Along with that not posting is making me upset and feel bad because i’m slacking so that makes me more upset and it's a bad spiral. So with that said, i’m hoping to turn things around and work on my blog again. While I’ve been absent, I’ve found a new passion. Geckos. Crested geckos to be exact. They are the most adorable things ever and I am completely obsessed with them. Over the course of two weeks, I went from owning just one tiny baby gecko to owning six geckos. Yes six. I love them all more than anything and am excited to start in my adventures of breeding them. I don’t have a plan on how this post is going and that seems to be very representative of my life at the moment, so I’m just going to share a brief description of each gecko with a photo gallery and personality traits. My first crested gecko is Norbert. I brought Norbert home on January 27th. He is 3 months old and tiny. I named him after the dragon Hagrid hatches in Harry Potter. Most crested geckos have tails, but he lost his as a hatchling so he is tailless. He is a sweet little thing and loves to just chill on my hand or perched on my finger tips. Just a couple days later I brought home Sunflower. I took a tipsy trip to petco with Amanda and ended up coming home with her. She’s got some beautiful spots and she does have a tail. She’s still a baby, I’m guessing around 6 months old. She’s a very jumpy gecko and loves to jump right out of my hands and scare me to death. Then just on Saturday, I found an ad on KSL for a breeding group of crested geckos. It was an amazing deal price wise and I could not pass it up. I ended up bringing home three adult females and one adult male. I am so in love with this group. Each gecko is so unique and has such different colorings from each other. As a extra surprise I found out that one of the females was already gravid (aka pregnant). So within the next month I’ll have some gecko eggs. Saturn is the male and has some amazing coloring to him. He’s pretty laid back, but really loves to be held by me. Zoey is the female that is pregnant. It’s hard to tell if she’s so relaxed because she is pregnant or if it’s really her personality. But she’s a sweetheart. Jade is a beautiful female and is super active. She loves to climb up arms and get as high as possible. Hazel is a super unique female. She’s called a patternless and turns a really dark brown color which is pretty rare. She’s also a very very jumpy girl. She has taken many scary dives to the floor. These geckos have become the center of my life and I adore them so much. I am so obsessed and you’ll get to hear about them a lot. |
AuthorHi! My name is Kylie. I'm 21 years old and am married to my best friend! I love my wonderfully normal life and hope you do too. Archives
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