Arasa the Mouse

One of our residents brought us a live baby mouse today to let us know that they are in his apartment. At first, D was going to kill it, but it was so cute we couldn't do it. We tried to feed it some rice milk in an eye dropper and to keep it warm with a rag in a box. E really liked it, she named it "Arasa" and called it her baby. It looked like it was doing ok for a while. It slept some, and then perked up and crawled around the box. We held it a few times. It was hard to tell if it was drinking any of the rice milk, but I thought it might have gotten a little.

I thought about pumping some breast milk for it, but I didn't make it to the shed to dig out the pump soon enough. It died this evening. I don't know if the breast milk would have helped anyway. The whole day was probably just too much shock and trauma on it's little body. I'm sure it was still nursing, so being away from it's mommy was just too much. Poor little baby! E was a little sad when it died and held it for a while. At first she thought it was going to come back to life. I told her that it's body was still here, but it's spirit is in heaven with Yeshua.

Then she started asking a bunch of questions about it's body, it's bones, it's heart, it's skin. So, call me weird.... I asked her if she wanted to dissect it. A few weeks ago she saw a deer get skinned after being shot, and she did really well with that. I was a little hesitant about the whole thing, but we explained that we only kill animals to eat and that it wasn't in any pain. She was happy to eat the meat when we got home, so I guess she wasn't traumatized.

She said she did want to dissect the mouse, so we looked at it's intestines, skin, bones, heart. For the record, I never even dissected the frog in high school, so this was all new to me. It was slightly disturbing for me, but really fascinating for her. She's been interested in everything about the body for a while now. She's been watching DK Eyewitness movies- the Human Machine and Skeletons- over and over.

Ironically, we had just watched the movie Ratatouille this morning.



This was after it died- it was a lot cuter when it was alive. I'll try to remember to take pictures of the burial tomorrow.