Of Mice and Men

So - Stuart Little aside...I just have to say that I think mice are nasty little disease carrying vermin.  They are not cute.  They are not lovable.  They are pests.  They are destructive.  They are dirty.  And when your home is infested with them - they are just plain creepy!

Last week we noticed we had mice when we found droppings under the sink in the kitchen.  Well, the first hint we had was when our old Sheltie, Autumn, started camping out in the kitchen - staring at the cupboard door.  She hates the kitchen - unless we are cooking and she thinks we might drop something edible.  Any other time she avoids it because of the Pergo flooring.  She's an old dog and has great difficulty getting traction on the slick surface.

So we opened said door and discovered the mouse droppings.  Being the total antithesis of calm and reasonable I flipped out and demanded that my husband set a mouse trap in the cupboard.  Which, of course, he did.  He pretty much would do anything to keep me from going into full nag mode.

The next morning we got up and were a trifle irritated to find that all the peanut butter was gone off the trap - but it had not been set off.  My husband was especially irritated when he opened the door to check and the mouse was sitting there looking at him while it cleaned it's whiskers.  So he put more peanut butter on the trap, reset it and closed the cupboard door again.

Autumn again took up vigil in the kitchen and this time we actually caught a mouse.  My husband tried to convince me that we only had the one mouse and that we didn't have to do anything else.  But since Autumn wouldn't leave the kitchen and was fixated on that cupboard, I convinced him to put out another trap.  He won't re-use a mouse trap - he throws them away with the mice.  This time when he checked there were two mice sitting there looking at him - and all the peanut butter was cleaned off the trap.

He took that as a challenge and decided he was going to catch the pesky little vermin.  He set out five traps in a circle so that they couldn't get to the peanut butter without setting at least one of them off - he thought.  They again cleaned off all the peanut butter and when he opened the cupboard door not only where they staring at him - they were actually sitting on the traps!  At this point I think he was on the verge of wild-eyed crazy.  So he went out and bought a different brand of mousetrap and placed them in the cupboard along with more of my all natural, organic peanut butter.  That was certainly successful - he figured out that he could drop the traps on the floor and not have them go off!.  But we did manage to catch one more mouse.  However, Autumn still insisted on camping out in the kitchen guarding the cupboard.

I think it was at this point that I started thinking an exterminator might be warranted.  But by now my husband was not going to admit defeat.  Back to the store he went, and returned with some sticky glue traps.  He set five of the wooden traps and a glue trap in the cupboard and managed to catch three of them all at once.  He decided at that point that he had fixed the problem - after all he had caught five mice.  I gave him 'The Look' and he decided that it would be a good idea to set more traps rather than have me go into full nag mode.

By now we are into day three of the 'War on Mice' and they are winning.  But my husband is nothing if not stubborn - I mean determined.  He continued to put out various combinations of traps - even went back to the store and bought a couple that look like giant binder clips.  The mice continued to eat all of my organic peanut butter and then go back to tell all their friends where they could get a free meal.  Autumn continued to be a speed bump in the doorway of my kitchen.  But we slowly but surely gained ground in the battle.  Through perserverence and sheer number of traps set in the cupboard we have managed to catch 13 mice so far.  Have we won the war?  Or are they only regrouping for another coup d'etat?  I fear the latter - there are still mouse droppings in the cupboard.  Autumn still haunts the kitchen.  Peanut butter continues to disappear.

Mouse traps are the only thing I will let him use.  My daughter's dog got into the Decon in her garage several years ago and had to be put down.  With three dogs of my own I'm not willing to take the risk that they may get into any kind of poison - so we continue to set traps and keep a scoreboard.

And I am sure my mother continues to look down on me and laugh.  She is so way past smiling - she is rolling on the clouds, can't catch her breath, tears running down her cheeks - laughing!  She thinks it's the perfect revenge for me bringing home the white mice from biology lab when I was a freshman in high school - and then leaving for the summer.  But that's another story - for another day.