Growing up in a very rural small town, I had access to all kinds of critters. We kept chickens and pigs, and my mom's family were all farmers. My father was a docent for the local wildlife preserve, as well as being a avid hunter and fisherman. He cared for quite a variety of animals at our house. I loved to go into the woods and fields and watch animals, and sometimes would catch one, only to release it later. My half sister stayed with us for about a week once, and she had a ten gallon tank crammed full of hay, with a family of field mice in it. They had tunneled and made nests in the hay, and I was just fascinated with them.
Later, over some holiday, I brought home a PEW my fifth grade class had. At some point I got a little book about mice, which is where I learned that there were other colors, though it never mentioned any of the shaded or marked varieties. It had a picture of a champagne mousie, and from then on I always thought how nice it would be to have one of those. But it had to wait as my mother was extremely phobic about mice, and wasn't too fond of all the other critters I brought home from time to time either.
As an adult, I went on to have the more typical kind of pets, you know, cats and dogs. When my daughter was about 11 she captured a house mouse, and since we had small plastic tank from a chameleon that she brought home at the end of a school year, I agreed that she could keep it. the poor thing was so frantic trying to escape that we let it go after a couple of days, and I agreed to take her to a petstore to find some pet meeces. We came home with a black mousie, a champagne (!) mousie and and uneven marked black.
Later, I decided we should buy a better water bottle, as we had broken two of the cheap glass tube type, and when we went back once more to our local petstore we found a ten gallon tank with about 50 or more mousies, does, bucks, babies...it was a pretty awful scene. Someone had been breeding meeces and had to get rid of them quick. I couldn't believe my eyes when I saw all the different colors and markings, and even satin coats. The store had cracked ten gallon tanks for $3.00, so I bought about 18 mousies that day. From that day on I was totally hooked, completely in thrall to the little weirdos. I get so much pleasure and relaxation from handling them, breeding them, watching the babies grow up, that I can't imagine being without mousies in my life.