In the last issue, We asked you which mother animal you most identify with--or which you most envy. Bears and seahorses were popular.

Here is a selection of answers submitted by our readers.

Armed and Ready

I am an octopus … all the time! Like one day last summer, when my two-year-old was in the Ergo carrier, I was holding packages and an umbrella (since it was pouring rain) and we had to walk twenty blocks home, and then he wanted to nurse--I just couldn't do it all.

Or last week, when he was in the stroller, he asked for a balloon, which he then didn't want to hold, so I had to hold it (of course making sure no part of it touched him), while also making sure his drink didn't spill and his crayons didn't fall, and holding my drink and pushing the stoller.

Is that even an octopus--maybe I need more than eight arms?

-- Eve Epstein, New York, NY

Happy Feat

I have always been crazy jealous of emperor penguins. Sure, they have to raise their chicks in the bitter cold--but Mom lays the egg and passes it to Dad. Then she gets to take off for the ocean, eat her fill, and come back when she feels like it. Dad has to stand perfectly still, starving and freezing his butt off until the egg hatches. Talk about co-parenting!

--Haly Lewis, Brush Prairie, WA

Eye-Eye, Son

My children adore pretending about alternate identities. One day, when I reminded my almost six-year-old son that I had asked him to brush his teeth before school rather than building another Lego spaceship, he asked, "Mom, if you were a cyclops, would you still see me so well?"

--Lisa Duval, Charlottesville, VA

Wake Me When You're Two

The animal mother that most inspires my envy is the black bear. The mother bear sleeps through the birth of her cubs and continues to snooze in her den as they nurse through the remainder of the winter. Wouldn't you love to get to sleep through labor and delivery and wake in the spring well rested?

--Liz Greenberg, Huntington, VT

Vole Me Over

One animal that I wish I had never gotten to emulate was the vole, whose "nursing" habits seem a little painfully close to home sometimes. Once, as a graduate student, I helped do a census of small mammals, everything from white-footed mice to wood rats. The little buggers could bite, necessitating leather gloves. By far the meanest, chomping-est beasts were the voles. They could bite through a leather glove as if it were paper. So, being the chicken-hearted entomologist that I was, I usually left voles to the person I was helping. One day, we caught a female vole and turned her over to find several pups attached to her teats. My friend explained that the pups hang on and the mother just drags them along the ground wherever she goes. I said, "No wonder they're so mean!"

Now whenever my little angel looks at me mischievously and bites that which feeds her, or tests the extent of my elasticity, I feel a little closer to my Inner Vole.

--Clare Wuellner-Tilson, Austin, TX

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