our first pets

This afternoon we were sitting on our front porch and I noticed {what I thought was} a small piece of bark. How would bark get on our second story porch? It wouldn't, but sometimes I don't think completely logically. It turned out to be a tiny brown frog, which we basically considered keeping. In the end we decided that wasn't very nice to do to a wild creature, so we didn't, but it put animal on the brain.

We were headed out anyways {to return a present we bought for my sister's birthday that we didn't end up needing} and we decided to swing by a pet store and look at the little pets. Apartment rules state that we can't have a pet that's not in a cage, so that ruled out most of the fuzzy cute ones, but we looked anyways. Snakes, lizards, rats, gerbils, mice, guinea pigs, and hamsters were basically our choices and most of those weren't rocking my world. To be honest, I wouldn't have been like "Let's buy a mouse!" if they hadn't been so stinking hilarious to watch. They were the little white feeder mice {basically bread to be fed to snakes} and they were going to town on the yellow wheel in their cage. Two of them were riding it together, and one would run, while the other one would hang on and flip around and around and around. It was pretty entertaining. They had personality. Most of the mice were asleep in a giant heap. Long story short, we were both in agreement. We needed a couple of mice.

We grabbed a cage, a yellow wheel, cedar chips, mouse food, a water bottle, and a london bridge for them to play on, and then spent a whopping $4 {that doesn't include the other stuff} on our new pets.

We thought about naming them Ralph and Stuart {a nod to Ralph S. Mouse and Stuart Little} but when we got home we noticed that one of them was a boy, and one of them... wasn't.

My first thought, "Awesome! Now we can tell them apart!"

Matt's first thought, "Shoot. Baby mice."

Nevertheless, they are a boy and a girl, so we had to think up new names. I don't know if we were the only two families in America that watched "An American Tale" growing up, but regardless, we both did. The story is about a mouse family that moves from Russia to America {this is where they sing "There are no cats in America, and the streets are paved with cheese!"}. The mother and father are just Mama and Papa, but the brother and sister names stuck immediately. I am happy to introduce you to...

Fievel

and

Tanya

I know, I know. They're way cuter than you expected right? Same here. :)