Babies are so cute...

Mable found this cute baby opossum in the back yard this morning.  When she found it, it was hanging upside down from the wheel barrow.  I wasn't fast enough to catch that cute picture.  When I got back out with the camera, it was sitting there, just like this and let me get very close and it just hunkered down and tried to ignore me.  It was so tiny, I could have held it on the palm of my hand.

Mable's such a good girl.  She didn't bother it, just barked until I came over to check on it.  And, it's a tiny baby, too small to even be scared.  Just sat there while she bayed at it.

This is our second baby opossum to find.  The first one...this cannot be it because it was older and that was a couple months ago...lived in the back flowerbed in some pipes that are out there until it got too big to hide in the pipes.  Mable would bark at one end and then run the 15 feet to the other end and bark there.  We didn't know what she was barking at until one day, she was at one end and I saw the baby possum stick its head out the other.  That would have been another cute picture.

Normally, I'm not much of an opossum person.  I am intimidated by those rows of sharp looking little teeth when they hiss at me...which they invariably do when I find an adult in the yard.  They do not "play possum" and lay there like they're dead.  They hiss at me and arch their back and spit like a cat.  So unlike the well behaved raccoons that climb a tree and then study me from above. 

There's gotta be a reason babies are so cute.  They say it's so we will take care of them, and I guess it's true.  This little baby made me so much want to pick it up and take care of it.  We let this little guy alone and when I went back to check, he was gone.  When Mable tried to find him, she sniffed all the way around the flowerbeds in the back and didn't bark, so I guess it's Mama came and took it home.  It's amazing that we get any baby creatures anymore, with the neighbor's cats terrorizing the neighborhood.  But, we do, including the family of raccoons that grew up in our chimney this year.  Every time that Rob would put the cap back on the chimney, it would get pushed to the side again.  Eventually, we started hearing the babies playing in there and then they'd chatter when they were hungry.  So much racket we could hear it all over the house.  But, they must have grown up and moved on because all is quiet there now and Bella has stopped standing in front of the firebox, barking at empty space.

Everybody have a great Wednesday. 

Lane