A very messy dinner time.

Those of you who follow my posts and check up on them regularly will know that Rocco and Savannah have done very well recently, and I am very proud of them.

Rocco has overcome his fear of live food, and helped himself to 6 meal worms the other night. He is looking a lot fatter for it and has shed since.
Savannah eats absolutely anything. She was the first to eat the meal worms and she will take big chunks out of food. She is not fussy at all.

Since I am so proud of my little dumplings, and they've even been polishing up some meal worms I've left in the vivarium, I decided I'd give them a little treat.

I don't have a blender or a food processor, but I had been determined for a while to start making my own fruit purees for my geckos. Rocco especially loves his fruit, and I love to see him lapping it up with a big dopey expression on his face. It makes me happy to know my geckos are happy, but it makes me even happier to know that they are healthy and getting what they need.

How I Did It

I found some gorgeous organic strawberries in my fridge. I washed them off and found a couple of ripe ones, and grabbed myself a chopping board.
I cut up the strawberries into small little sections to make it easier for myself to mush, and grabbed a cheese grater! I read online that if you don't have a blender or a food processor, a wire mesh sieve makes a grate fruit musher. I couldn't find a sieve like this, so I settled for a cheese grater in stead.
As much as I could, I mushed up the fruit with one side of the cheese grater. I poured the juice and the 'mush' into an egg cup, and stirred it and crushed it further with a teaspoon.
After that, I added a large amount of calcium and small amount of multivitamin supplement and stirred it all in together.

Savannah Banana

I find it more important to feed Savannah right now, as she is little for her age.

She's growing SO well since we've had her, and I'm already noticing great differences in her weight and her size. Her ribs are less visible and she has very healthy calcium sacs, now.

Savannah has never been any trouble with feeding. She was very hungry on her first feed, and she likes anything we give her. So far she has adored the CGD, eaten many meal worms and lapped up every flavour of baby food we've put her way.

My general thoughts were that, even though Rocco loves his fruit more than anything else, Savannah would get along better with the strawberry puree. It wasn't super smooth due to my lack of equipment, and Savannah is great at taking large bites out of food.

I don't know what it is with my geckos and climbing on their food, I really don't.

Not only did this feeding session with Savannah lead to some very mucky little feet, but Mama managed to get strawberry mush all over her jeans, too! How delightful.

The only issue I have when manually feeding Savannah is that she prefers things to be au naturale. She likes to hunt for her food, and prefers live food. She's not so keen on being hand-fed, which tends to appeal more to Rocco.

I would say Savannah is definitely the independent one of the two.

I did get her to take some hearty bites out of it that I sadly didn't catch.

All in all she did pretty good, but got herself VERY mucky.

Rocco Banocco

Rocco didn't do as good as I was expecting.

I noticed that 2 meal worms had disappeared from the bowl that I refilled early this afternoon, so that might be down to Rocco. He was looking a little tubby, now I mention it...

All Rocco really wanted to do was jump, and it was difficult for me to get any pictures or videos because I had to try and catch him and scoop him up without getting mush all over myself and my carpet.

I got him to take a few licks here and there, but really he was pretty useless. I was expecting my little fruit bat to do much better!

The second picture is meant to show Rocco licking up the strawberries, but it actually shows a blur of my hand trying to catch him as he jumped away. The third picture shows the result of that.

After I caught him, he did a nice poo in my hand. Great.

I sharply put him back after that.

Now, as you can see, that was rather eventful... And messy!

I don't think I'll be mushing up some fruit anytime soon.

I think we'll stick to meal worms for now.

Well, what can I say. You never know unless you try! You try to do a nice thing... And you get mushed and pooed on!

Elly. x