Rats! Or a mouse... I'm not sure...

While I absolutely love animals and I've always had a heart for them, I've never been a huge rodent fan, or any creature of that variety- mice, rats, guinea pigs, hamsters, etc. I didn't grow up with rodents as pets and one of my earliest and only memories of rats was having a couple of them as pets in my third grade classroom and one day, hearing a scream from one of the boys, looking over and his finger is gushing blood. That was enough to keep me at arms length from the little creatures. (although, looking back, the little boy whose finger was bitten was a bit of a punk, so he probably did something to anger the rat in the first place and the rat was probably more than justified in sinking his teeth into the brat) But, I am a sucker for anything that is seemingly helpless... thus the reason I now have a newborn mouse/rat (still undetermined) in my garage.

I was out for a walk this morning and I noticed something off to the side of the sidewalk. I looked closer and all that I could tell was that it was a creature of some sort that had, obviously, just been born within the past day or two because it had no hair, was probably 3-4 inches long and it's eyes were still shut. There were ants starting to crawl all over it and it was shaking, so it was obviously still alive. I can't imagine anyone could see that and just walk on, so I picked up a couple of leaves and brushed the ants off of it, scooped it up into one of the leaves and carried it back home. I put it in a box and took it to the vet down the street and they confirmed that it was either a mouse or a rat, but it was too early to tell which one. They said that I could leave it with them and they would 'take care of it'. I know what 'take care of it' meant. They weren't going to be nursing it back to health, they were going to euthanize it. So, now I have a mouse/rat (temporarily) in a mouse house in my garage. Mind you... this is NOT a new pet. It's going to take God to get this mouse to survive the next couple of days. We're trying to give it Pedialyte and Kitten Milk Substitution (what the vet and a Rat/Mouse Rescue organization (yes, they do exist) told me to do), but we can't be certain that it's even taking any of it in. But, I have to, at the very least, give it a chance to survive and, if it does, I already had an employee at Petsmart tell me to come back in and she might be able to find a home for it, or, at the very least, because it is not a domesticated mouse, I can release it back into the hills. Even if I wanted a mouse as a pet (and I don't), I couldn't keep it... I have cats who would think that it's their new playtoy.

This was definitely not in my plans for the weekend...