Mama vs. the Mouse

The morning started like any other: the baby in his high chair eating Os cereal, me at my computer checking email. And then I saw a dark thing blur across my vision, felt the bump on my foot, and saw the dark thing zip away.

I decided I must have seen something that wasn't there, maybe I was staring into too bright of a computer screen . . . 

until the mouse came back.

So I jumped up onto a chair to ponder what to do. The mouse stared at me and I at him.

I saw that he had darted under my dishwasher, so I hatched a plan that involved throwing a colander on him to pin him down. I stood on a stool (to keep me up and safe from him) and waited. Mr. Mouse came out of his hole a half dozen times to look at me, then retreated. Who was this crazy bold mouse?

I faced the fact that I wasn't going to catch this darting rodent with a colander, so I braved crossing the kitchen, finding the snap traps in the garage, and setting them with peanut butter.

This is normally Chris' domain, so you know I was doing it only because he was traveling on business.

Those directions may say to set the traps every few feet, but I say, the more the merrier. I set four of them, three within inches of the mouse hole.

I took the baby and fled the kitchen, taking refuge with the now-awake children in the bedrooms upstairs.

We waited.

I went back to check the state of affairs only 15 minutes later and Mr. Mouse was resting in peace.

And a note to those manufacturers: I'm glad I set many traps near to each other. The mouse had licked the peanut butter off of one trap without setting it off before going to a second trap for dessert . . . his last dessert, I might add.

I won't post the photo of Mr. Mouse in his death scene--but, oddly, you can view online many artistic pencil sketches of dead mice by an American artist of the 1950s as displayed at Harvard Art Museum--however, you know he was One Honkin' Big Mouse when Chris responded to the photo I emailed him with: "He's huge!"

Yes, he was huge . . . and now I had a huge mouse carcass to dispose of and no husband in sight for 48 hours.

I pondered whether the fire department would help in an emergency such as this. I pondered calling some friend's husband or basically any man to deal with this. I can face natural childbirth, I can face any kind of diapering situation, but this dead rodent I didn't want to face.

But I finally managed it: I swept the critter into the trash can and got the whole bag of trash outside.

And then I--who does school time every morning by nine, who doesn't go on morning errands ever anymore--took the morning off of textbooks and took the children to the hardware store to buy more mouse traps.

We ended up buying more at the hardware store than just rodent-killing devices, but that is a story for another post.

Meanwhile, I am feeling increasingly in awe thinking of real women who have lived on frontiers, faced real deadly animals, knew how to cock a gun to defend their children from wild beasts, women who couldn't afford the luxury of being truly, heart-racing afraid of a mouse weighing a few grams.