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I like to think of myself as the 'crazy mom of four'. I'm 31 years old and I love my life, my kids, my husband and my God. "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." Jim Eliot

Friday, June 25, 2010

Smarter than a mouse

If only we could be smarter than the mouse we are apparently keeping as a pet...

Kris finally got some cheap traps, the kind that crush the mouse, instead of the more humane ones that close the mouse in, since they aren't working anyway. I have no good feelings for this mouse that has caused me an extreme amount of anxiety over the last few weeks. So I'm OK with doing whatever it takes to get it out of my house. I had a dream last night that there were three of them. It's weighing on me so heavily now that I am dreaming about it!

I HATE to be scared. Just ask Kris what happens when you stand outside the bathroom door, thinking it would be funny to startle me when I open the door. He has never done THAT again! I tend to be jumpy in general, especially when I'm not in the best place mentally. So, naturally, I am extremely jumpy and on edge. I never know when the mouse is going to show itself and so my guard is constantly up. There has been a lot of screaming in my house this last week. The mouse has peeked it's tiny little head out from under my entertainment center. It has run across the baseboards in my living room. It has gone down into the hallway towards the kids' rooms. It has spent time under the China cabinet in my dining room. And it has run across the kitchen to hide under the dishwasher right in front of me. Last night I was so on edge I was thinking about the mouse and saw a shadow move across the ceiling and screamed. Poor Kris. I scared him! I had to explain to him, feeling quite foolish, that I'd seen a shadow and it scared me.

Last night we learned just how smart this mouse is. Kris set the traps with peanut butter and we put one in front of the dishwasher, where it seems to reside (underneath it) and one in another area we see the mouse hide. Kris watched one of the traps move last night. Backwards. Not sideways. Backwards. It was as if the mouse had reached out it paws, placed one on each side of the trap, and pulled it back! This left the trap to where if it sprung, it would hit the dishwasher, instead of fully engaging. Kris turned it sideways at this point in the hopes that it couldn't do that again. This morning when we woke up, the peanut butter was gone from one trap completely. Additionally, the trap that had been in front of the dishwasher was missing SOME of the peanut butter, and beyond that, IT WAS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE KITCHEN FLOOR!!! I am not exaggerating, not even a little.

So instead of US capturing the mouse, it's like the mouse is saying to us, "I'm gonna get you!" AHHH!!!! Kris thinks he may not have set the traps right. We have no idea what we're doing. We've never tried to catch mice before. The instructions for setting the traps were confusing. But either the mouse is really THAT sly, he has help from 20 other mice, or the traps are set wrong. Let's hope it's the latter!

I told Kris last night that if the mouse would just start cooking meals for us, I'd be OK with letting it live here. You know, like in Ratatouille?


2 comments:

  1. OMG that mouse is a genius! You should trap him and bring him to bars to do tricks haha

    Hope you catch him tho, I would be so jumpy too!

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  2. Ew, I hate, hate, hate mice!! We used to have a terrible problem with them since there is a field right behind the house. Those sticky traps worked amazingly well, though we did have some awful smart ones too that were SO hard to catch! I finally got so sick of mice, I bought a cat... hehe We have not had a huge problem with them since.. although we do get one or two that wander in occasionally. They don't last very long with the cat around though ;)

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