Inactivity Notice & Explanation (Li Mei & Jupiterkit)

[fancypost bgcolor= #477C89; border: 0px black; width: 360px; height: 230px; overflow: auto; text-align: justify; color: #9FBAC1;]Yeah, anyone who roleplays with Li Mei or Jupiterkit regularly will have noticed I haven't posted with them for a while, or with any of my characters really- at least, not as much as I used too.

There is a reason behind that. For the last year or so, we've had problems with our guinea pigs constantly getting pregnant, and us not being able to separate males from females in time to prevent it happening again. Now, that in itself isn't a problem really- the mothers care for their babies well, and we never had any issues with them being weaned or anything like that because they did it themselves. Around a month and a half ago, I lost a guinea pig to complications giving birth, and she left behind two newborns that needed hand-rearing, which involved getting up every two hours to feed them both. One died, but the other survived. During that time, I was tired and not really up to roleplaying much, though I tried to make a few posts a day. The surviving baby is now weaned and lives indoors with another weaned baby who is blind.

Our older, outdoor babies, which are around two-three months old, should also be weaned, and they were. But around a week ago, they began suckling again off a single sow who is still producing milk for reasons we don't know. On Thursday, one of our younger ones died suddenly- one minute she was fine, then she suddenly couldn't move her hind legs and began dragging herself around, then she couldn't move at all and simply laid limply making strange growling noises if we touched her, and ten minutes later, she's dead. On Sunday, we found another dead baby, again another of the younger ones. He didn't have any signs of distress whatsoever before dying- we went out to check on them, and they were all fine, then went out again five minutes later to do some work in the garden and found him dead. The only sign of injury or illness we could find on him was a strange lump behind his left front leg. The vet cannot tell us what is happening, because we can't get one in that's got the illness and is still alive, and has simply said to observe them and if we see signs of distress try to get them in. Unfortunately the vet is half an hour away from where we live, so by the time we see signs of trouble it's probably going to be too late.

As a result, most of my time is now taken up with keeping a careful watch on the four remaining outdoor babies, as well as our indoor pair because they had interactions with the two that died recently (and the hand-reared one has no natural immunity to illness since he was hand-reared from the second he was born). I'm not really in the mood for roleplaying because I'm too worried about them all.

So yeah, that's why I'm inactive at the moment. I don't know how long it will last, because we can't figure out what's up with the guinea pigs at all. It's just the babies in that one hutch as well- all our other guinea pigs have been perfectly healthy.

And if anyone has any idea what the heck is going on, or has had anything similar happen, please let me know. I'm really worried about these guys.
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