As much as we loved Aya, we almost didn't get her at first.  In 2000, our first experience with buying guinea pigs, I picked out Eve and Elizabeth picked out another pig that turned out to be a boy, so our mom pointed out little Aya to us.  She was so adorable that we had to bring her home with us.  Her and Eve got along great and both were happy until Caramel came and messed up their cage system.  Aya no longer snuggled with Eve, but rather she stood guard outside of the pigloo while the others rested.  We thought that she was being picked on by the others and being left out, but now we know that Aya was the dominant pig in the cage.  She may have been the smallest, but she was trying to protect the others.  Aya was also the loudest of our pigs in her early years.  She would wheek so loud for food while Eve and Caramel sat back, and then they would steal her food.  It sounds like she was picked on, and maybe she was, but she seemed to handle it pretty well.

In December of 2001, we noticed that Aya's one eye looked funny and didn't seem to have as much hair around it as it should.  We took her to the vet and found out that she had ringworm.  We caught it very early though and were able to get her through it.  We separated her from her friends and she was normal again in a few weeks with the help of her medicine.  During this time, Aya began to get a lot more attention than normal, and she became quite used to it.

Aya may not have enjoyed the company of her cage mate Caramel very much, but she loved being held by us.  She would always run over when we came downstairs and stand up at the front of her cage, just waiting to be picked up.  We never had to chase her around the cage to get her to come out because she actually preferred sitting with us.  Her favorite place to sit was pretty much perched on my shoulder, and whenever I sat her on my lap, she would scurry up to sit there.  She loved to be kissed on her nose and scratched behind her ears and hated it when I stopped.  She would look at me with this adorable little look on her face as if she was saying "What are you doing?  I'm not done yet!" and then put her head back down so I would resume petting her.  She also had a love for paper lunch bags.  We would cut a hole in one end to give her a tube to run through and she would have a ball pushing it around her cage and sitting in it.

Aya never really had anything else wrong with her after she recovered from ringworm, and seemed to be really healthy.  However, in the beginning of October, 2006, Aya went downhill really fast.  She stopped eating, drinking, and running around.  She was really lethargic and didn't even seem to acknowledge us when we came over to her cage.  It was a really drastic change in the span of only a day.  We scheduled a vet visit for her because we had recently been through something similar with Hazel, but she gave up before we had a chance to bring her.  Her death really came out of nowhere, as she was fine one day and gone two days later.  I am glad that it went quickly though, for her sake, and for ours.  She was pretty old (she had to be older than six, since we got her in 2000), but she was and will forever be known as our little Baby Aya.

Aya was such a pleasant guinea pig to have, and I bonded with her more than any other over the years.  She was so sweet and gentle, and I don't think that we will ever be able to find another as friendly, trusting, or affectionate as she was.

- Jen