Andante the Russian Tortoise

by Jen
(Minneapolis, MN)

For my birthday last year (at the end of September), my husband decided to take me to the local reptile store to let me pick out an adorable little Russian tortoise. I picked the littlest girl they had, and I named her Andante, which is a musical term that means "a moderate walking pace" and indicates a slow tempo.

Over the past three months, Andante and I have gotten to know each other, and even though she has no voice, she certainly knows how to communicate her preferences. There's nothing she loves more than a nice, juicy carrot, and some days when I try to feed her other veggies, she just turns up her nose and burrows back into her haystack. But as soon as I put a carrot in her cage, she comes running out and gobbles it up. Once she was so excited about her carrot that she climbed up her haystack and slid down the other side on her plastron.

She also has her own ideas about where her "furniture" belongs and spends time pushing it around to where she wants it, even if it's bigger and heavier than she is. Her shell is only the size of the palm of my hand, but she acts like no obstacle is too large for her.

She and I enjoy spending our mornings finding the patches of natural sunlight coming in through our windows and basking in them, and I never get bored with watching all the adorable things she does. She has been the perfect little pet, and I hope that she and I have many years together ahead of us.