I encourage it! It's a really fun way to track their daily development.


I agree, Svet is irresistible. But you can't have her, she's mine.

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Ragu's litter are full of energy now, so it can't be long before their eyes finally open...




The six Pearl pups in particular are little firecrackers zooming in all directions when you take them out on the bed...




I guess since they've never actually seen anything they have no qualms about zipping randomly around an unknown location. They seem to have no fear, which is a good thing, because we've worked hard never to give them a reason to be frightened...




The rooms their tank occupy are always kept quiet because any loud or strange noises at such a young age might make them jumpy for the rest of their lives, the pups are so impressionable...




More then a year ago I had a litter of very friendly pups but while I had one of them out to play seperate from the rest a rock hit a nearby window, making a huge racket, and she never recovered from that, so while her siblings are very tame now, Toffee to this day avoids me at all costs. See, it's that easy to ruin the taming process...




What helps though is Ragu herself, the pup's mom. She loves being picked up and handled, which means she isn't nervous when I'm reaching into the tank, so neither are her pups.

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Sadly, we lost a mouse last night. We found Kinko had passed away in her sleep when we were cleaning our largest tank. The little black-and-white Pinto will be missed, here is the last pic we took of her, playing with Pixie on the wheel...




Kinko was a friendly mouse and well-liked by the rest of her tank members. She was one of the older ones in the tank too, which means that now just Pixie and Oreo are the only ones in there older then a year. Here's a nice pic of our two seniors together:




Those two hang out together a lot. Pixie is nearly two years old, while Oreo is more then three. You wouldn't know it to look at her, Oreo shows no real signs of aging other then her fur is a bit rougher now. They get along great with the younger mice, like Frenzy here:




The Red-Eyed Grey is a Knockout mouse though, and while she might not be with us for that long due to the gene tinkering that was done to her, she seems healthy and happy right now, and that's all that matters...




After Oreo and Pixie, the old guard, are gone, the senior mice will be mice like Strudel, the above Broken Agouti, and her siblings. They still seem like pups to me though...

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I had Ragu's Skewbald pups out today on fresh sheets, and boy did they have fun...




To them a changed bed is a whole new world and instantly they set off in all directions to explore it...




I pushed the sheets together and made lots of canyons and tunnels for them to scuttle through, they had an excellent time getting lost and tumbling off cliffs.




I wish their Pearl siblings could have been with them but lately they are so fast it's too dangerous to have all ten pups out at the same time, so I just brought out the four marked ones this morning...




I'll take out the Pearls tonight, fair is fair...




Anyway, the only pups I know for sure I'm keeping are the Skew' with the spot on her shoulder and her banded sister who you might have noticed was the star of this photo shoot. She has become my favorite and I'm not letting her get away.

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Calypso's tank seems to be on an opposite schedule to the rest of our haven's mice. They are almost always up in the afternoon while all the rest of the tanks are asleep. Like yesterday afternoon when I came in, half of the tank were out having fun...




Calypso herself was eating her favorite thing in the world, sunflower seeds, while Nougat, the big Skewbald, dug in the dish for treats of her own...




And on the opposite side of the tank Amber was up on top of the egg carton, trying to get my attention...




The Golden Agouti stands on her hind legs and cranes upwards, eager for me to put my hand in so she can hop aboard. Amber is such a sweet mouse.

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More fun on the bed this morning with Ragu's pups...




There's the banded Skewbald, isn't she a sweetie. I just love her tail, it's getting really long...




Her and her siblings got first crack at the new bedding, and they had a wonderful time playing hide-and-seek amongst the covers. But they tired themselves out fast and soon were ready to go to sleep...




Luckily I had a back-up group of pups to play with:




Their six grey siblings were also eager for an adventure outside of the nesting box...




And these excusions aren't just for them now, they are also to help their mom get used to them not being around all the time...




Soon enough Ragu will be weaning them and from my observations of her behavior I think she will need to be seperated from them very soon after that...

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Everybody is still getting along great in the newly merged Calypso/Amber tank. All six mice act like they have always been together, there is no rivalry whatsoever, even Svetlana is having fun now...




We've given them lots of things to climb on, though most still love scaling the wheels the best...




There is no better toy for a mouse then a gravity wheel, IMHO, they always find a hundred ways to have fun on it. And of course there's always the classic tear up the sleeping box game...




That's Sui above, peering at me in annoyment because I interupted her chewing. She's gotten really big, hard to believe that for the first month I had her she was just a tiny wheezy runt with stale fur who I thought was going to pass away any minute...




It's like Svetlana, above. She's a Rex, and I'd say only one in four actually make it past eight weeks, but here she is, big, energetic and healthy, I'm very thankful.

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I was met with a wonderful sight when I took a handful of Ragu's pups out for some fun, take a look:




That's the banded Skewbald, my favorite, and she finally has her eyes open, yay!




Now it's only a matter of time before the babies start coming out of the nesting box on their own, I can't wait...




They certainly are getting around like real mice now, and once all of them have their eyes open, which will most likely happen within less then 24 hours from now, they will be impossible to contain...




They don't all have theirs cracked yet, so some are still docile and just prefer to lie in a dog-pile asleep when I take them out, mostly the Pearls. But not this one:




That's the doe my friend is taking for her own breeding. She will be so happy when I send her this pic.

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Awwwwwwwwwww I love that third pic, your friend is very lucky to be getting such a beauty.

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gsds (Henrick and Bella), the cats (Syd, Lilly, Elvis and Dizzy), the gerbils (Honey, Lisa, crusty, Millhouse, Flanders, Bart and Homer), the rats (Valentine, Flower, Petal, Blossom, Koda, Cava, George), the mice (Minnie, Pop, Seudag, Caraid, Silver, Trouble, Athena, Pandora, Aphrodite, Meep, and Springtime)

Awww, sooooo cute

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