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So Baby A Squirrels Tale
By Martha Michael, Sean Winburn AuthorHouse LLC
Copyright © 2014 Martha Michael
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4918-5803-5
CHAPTER 1
When I was born I was blind, naked and toothless. I weighed about one ounce and was about three inches long. Can you imagine how small I was? Somehow I had fallen out of my nest high in the rafters of the pole barn. My human parents found me under the wing of their airplane parked outside of the airplane hanger. How I got there I will never know. Perhaps an angel swooped down, scooped me up and laid me there.
At first they thought I was a baby mouse. My human dad picked me up, and when I began to wiggle, he saw I was a newborn baby squirrel. He laid me in a small box and took me inside their house where it was cozy and warm. I was so thirsty! My human mom gave me my first drink of water. She used an eyedropper because my mouth was so tiny.
The next morning I was still alive and wiggling around in the box. My human mom went to the pet store and bought a can of puppy milk for me to drink and a tiny baby bottle. She would feed me every two hours. Within a week my fur started to grow. Two weeks later my eyes opened and I had my first look at my new human mom and dad and the beautiful world I was about to live in. They lived in the country with lots of land and trees.
Sometimes my mom would take me out of my box, wrap me in a white handkerchief, and lay me in the palm of her hand. We would lie on the carpet and take a nap in the sunshine. My mom named me "So Baby" because I was such a tiny baby squirrel. I learned to hold the baby bottle with my two front paws and feed myself.
When I began to climb out of my box, my mom bought me a cage to live in. She put the cage in her exercise room. It had lots of windows and a mirror on one wall. She put the cage in front of the mirror so I could see what I looked like. Boy! I did not look at all like my human mom and dad. I was a boy squirrel with brownish-red fur and a long bushy tail that curled up behind me when I sat. I had two, really long, yellow teeth.
My mom fixed me a nesting basket filled with twigs and leaves and hung it in my cage. That was where I slept, all curled up in a ball.
Once I had a really bad tummy ache. My mom gave me some pink medicine to make me feel better. It really did work. She gave me some peanut butter to eat. I loved the nutty taste. My mom would let me out of my cage to run around in the exercise room. One day she came in to check on me and saw that I had chewed the top of her organ and had started chewing her scrabble board. Since my teeth grow constantly throughout my life, I just had to have something to chew on. It was that day that Mom decided to move me outside.
Mom cut a big limb off a hedge apple tree and put it on the patio. She hung my nesting basket on a branch and everyday she filled it with cracked nuts, fruit and vegetables. I was now an outdoor squirrel. I would run from the patio into the back yard and when I discovered the swimming pool, I would climb down the ladder and dive under the water. I was a really good swimmer.
I would soon venture down to the tree grove behind the house to play. There were so many big trees down there. I was spending so much of my time in the tree grove that my dad made me a tree house out of an old ice chest. He cut a small hole in it for my door and put it high up in the tree. I would be safe there. Dad nailed boards on the trunk of the tree so that my mom could climb up and check on me.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from So Baby A Squirrels Tale by Martha Michael, Sean Winburn. Copyright © 2014 Martha Michael. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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