Oh to be a Parent

I don't think I've worried this much in my entire life. In a stunning-to-nobody-except-me lack of willpower and abundance of cuteness, we now have guinea pigs. We were supposed to just be looking at cute pets but at some point looking turned into holding and now we have two female guinea pigs, named Widget and Ezio. Yes, Ezio is a boy's name. It's not our fault, we named the little ginger fool before she was sexed by the vet, so we now have a guinea pig with gender identity issues. Onto the worrying, however. I have since found out that guinea pigs will insist on establishing dominance within a cage, and they do this usually by nudging, mounting and occasionally nipping at each other's heels. However the worrying part of the advice is the part most often repeated: "Don't separate them unless they draw blood." Great. That's sort of like telling me not to worry about cooling my pc unless it blows up. I'm fairly sure having a bleeding guinea pig is better prevented than dealt with, though at the moment they seem to be establishing dominance by just hopping and chasing. Well, Ezio is anyway. Widget still seems fairly traumatised by the taxi ride home, where she was sat in the footwell with every bump and noise it entailed, and is refusing to vocalise. This gets me thinking about what a panicker I am. I'm one of nature's great worriers; if something can conceivably go wrong, it already has in my head. Hence, I am sat at work imagining the bleeding wreck of a guinea pig I will face when I get back later. Ezio will have picked Widget's eyeball out and she'll be in incredible pain, and I'll have to take her to the vets to be put down, and then I'll return to find Ezio has developed a taste for flesh and everyone I know and love is dead, and I don't even have the receipt because she ate that as well. If I worry this much about two guinea pigs, Christ only knows what I'll be like as a parent.