Here’s a story I forgot to post about back in January when it happened…

It was right after New Years. Patrick walked in the kitchen and yelled that a mouse was on our kitchen counter! The next few minutes must have looked rather funny from the outside – us running around like idiots with a box, trying to catch the mouse. It ended up somewhere in the laundry room and we knew we wouldn’t be able to find it amongst our storage mess.

Since we had gone on a mini vacation after Christmas we just left a few of our Christmas presents under the tree. One of them being a food basket with maple syrup, pancake mix, a pound cake, etc. As we were taking out the items to put in the pantry we noticed someone had gotten to the pound cake before us! Part of the plastic wrapping was missing…instead there was a chunk gone from the cake. The little bastard!

Another night we were sitting on the couch watching TV. And who do you think comes running across the floor, right in front of our faces?! None other than “mouse in the house”! The nerve! And again we had a funny episode of a mouse chase. “Quick, get a box!”…”Pick up the chair!!”…”Where did it go??”…”Is it hanging on to the bottom of the chair??”…”No!”. The mouse had gotten away again.

That night we heard it running around the house as we were falling asleep. That’s it; we had to get a mouse trap. Since it wasn’t going to contribute in rent or pick up some groceries we had to give it the boot. So the next day we went to the big box store to find a mouse trap. We looked horrified at all the “Will Kill!” boxes. We didn’t want to kill the poor little mouse; we just wanted it out of our house! So we found a cheap seesaw mechanism that would entice the mouse to walk in towards the food, then snap the door shut when its weight would shift. A “No Kill” trap. So we went home, put some peanut butter on the trap’s end, placed it along a wall and went to bed hoping we would catch a mouse. Sure enough, we woke up in the morning and had a little friend in our trap. AHA! Take that you little mouse, you! We got out a box and let is slide out of the trap. Our plan was to release it in a park later on. In the meanwhile we put some peanut butter in with it. Just look at our cute, adorable little evil-doer…

Well, we didn’t quite get that far as releasing it in the park. Next thing we knew another mouse was running across the floor in front of us. Had our little mouse escaped the box? We checked…it was still there. Our next fear was – if this is mouse number two, how many other mice could there be?! Two mice can easily turn into a million! Mouse #1 would have to make do in the box for another night. The trap was set again. Excitedly we checked the box the next morning. Negative. No mouse was in it – bummer. Mouse #1 would have to wait yet another night. And the next morning – success! We caught mouse #2!

So we drove to release the mice. We turned over the box and mouse #2 (slightly larger than mouse #1) bolted out of the box, never to be seen again. Mouse #1 however wasn’t coming out. We turned the box entirely upside down…it wouldn’t come out. It was clinging onto the box with dear live. We started shaking the box until it finally fell out. It was just sitting there, shivering amidst the leaves and pine straw, not moving.

This is where we started getting a little “emotional”. How could we leave this poor little shivering mouse in the cold?? It could die out here! We’d been so busy trying to get the mouse out of our house and now we were pacing back and forth discussing taking it back to the house! So we determined we had to take the mouse back to the house and feed it back to health. Obviously leaving it in the box all those days with relatively little food (just the bit of peanut butter we had put in there) must have weakened it. After working so hard not to kill it we couldn’t very well leave it there to die. So we took it back, gave it some more pound cake (hey, it had already had some, we may as well give it the rest, right?), and hoped it would regain energy. The next day we drove it back to the park and turned over the box. Poof, it was gone. It had no trouble running this time.

Relieved that this episode was over we went back to the house. And that’s the story of our mouse in the house…