When the authors two children a boy and a girl were young, they often crawled into bed with his wife and him in the morning, he would make up stories about two little mice, Ticklemouse and his friend Lively, who lived in the same house as the little boy or girl, depending on who was listening. Ticklemouse was the authors right hand and Lively his left, and they loved to tickle the kids whenever the mice got excited during the story. He never knew where the stories would go as he made them up, but over time, several were repeated often enough that they became memorable. When his kids grew up and had kids of their own, the author