How to Give Your Guinea Pig Antibiotics: The Critical Mom Tells All

Well, you can try letting the children do it, but a few precious drops will spill.  Or you can try getting your husband or oldest son to hold the piggy still and gentle press her jaws open.  Or you can let her think she's bigger than you.

This is easier than it sounds.  You get an old towel and set her atop it on the dining room table.  Then you crouch down in front of her so that her nose is higher than yours.  She looks sweet, maternal, bemused.  What are these folks up to?

Here's what I am up to:  I am sinking the little plastic plunger--imagine something that you could use to squirt liquid down Barbie's throat--into the little brown bottle of liquid antibiotic.  Incidentally--a thrilling cultural fact--German medicines of all kinds tend to come in little brown bottles.  So that when I gave my best friend, who is American, some eucalyptus bath oil, she thought it was this other stuff she saw me squirting down the throat of my then three-year-old ("But it was the same!  I know it was because it was in a brown bottle!!" said she.  Who then complained of burping eucalyptus oil all day.)  But actually my three-year-old had been swallowing something quite different, a terrific cold medicine called Umckaloabo, whose virtues are detailed elsewhere on this blog.

Anyway, the piggy seemed pleased by my head being lower than hers, so that she continued to look down at me with a superior air while I snuck the dropper up toward her mouth.  As I poked it at her lips, she pulled back in distaste, but then opened for the nanosecond required because she wanted to yawn.  I seized my chance, she swallowed the stuff, and the whole operation took less than five minutes.