Mouse Girl

 I bought three baby mice in Mid-May. I have never met a true baby mouse--those fleshy creatures with closed eyes, like a wriggling pile of alien embryo--but pet stores sell them fairly young nonetheless. According tot he Laboratory Animal Resource Center at University of California San Francisco, mouse pups are pretty well off the nip after a couple of weeks. Chewy (the online pet supply store) suggests mice are fully weaned at around three weeks, and typically pet stores begin selling them when they are 5-8 weeks old.  This is all to say: I got baby mice in Mid-May but I don't know how  baby those babies were. I do suspect one was a bit younger than the other two since she was notably smaller.  Baby mice are always exciting because like all babies they're going to grow . And, yes, of course this means that their bodies will change. In the past two weeks they've all gotten larger. But most excitingly their personalities  get bigger.  So anyway, these are t...

 My wife and I were sitting in bed when I heard the familiar tck-tck of paws on a screen. I flipped forward, belly to mattress, resting on my forearms at the foot of our bed. Head tilted to the side, I peered into the first of two cages on the bookshelf before me. There she was: small, a coat of white and gray splotches, perfect pink toes and round pink ears, hanging upside down.  "I knew it," I cried with glee, bouncing back to a seated position next to my wife.  "What?" They laughed.  "Junebug! She's crawling around upside down."  Six weeks ago, we brought home three baby mice: Petal, Dandelion, and Junebug. Petal is sleek and fast with a burnt orange coat. Dandelion is a very light tan and a somewhat bossy disposition. Junebug, the last of the three that I chose, looked like she might be a week or so younger than the others. She was so, so small then.  She was so small I worried about her in relation to the other two. For the first week or so, we no...