There's a Mouse in the House!

Sunday morning was quite an eventful one.

I live in Ohio, out in the boondocks, where harvest time equals mice. Luckily for us we live a bit of a ways from a field and don't get the hoards of mice that someone living right next to a field might, but that doesn't change the fact that our entire town is surrounded by fields. So when I saw those little black turds on my counter, I knew we had a mouse, and I knew we had to kill him.

So I did what any person would do; I bought some traps Saturday, baited them with some peanut butter and waited. As long as I didn't see this said mouse, I was in no real hurry but knowing it was out there, somewhere, gave me the heebee-jeebees.

I was the first up on Sunday morning. I walked into the kitchen all sleepy-eyed, stretching and trying to get over how light it was outside for 7:00 a.m. and appreciating that extra hour of sleep when I noticed that one of my traps was gone. I was dumb-founded for a minute, because if it had moved, it meant that something big enough to move it was on my counter over night and THAT is a freaky thought.

So I looked around a bit and noticed that it had somehow gotten back behind my coffee pot that sits at an angle in the corner of the counter. So I moved it out a bit and immediately jumped, screamed and started acting like a two year old, something I never expected from myself.

"Jeremy! Jeremy! Mouse! There's a mouse!"

I'm standing in the kitchen yelling and alternating between jumping up and down and what I'm now calling the 'disgusted jig'. For future reference: I cannot dance, no matter what the circumstance.  I run into the bedroom where my husband has gotten out of bed and is standing right inside of the door. I swing it open, almost hitting him, but I don't care there's something more important to be taken care of right now.

"Jeremy! Mouse! There's a mouse! There's a mouse and, and, IT'S ALIVE!"

And it was. When I moved the coffee pot, what did I see? A cute little mouse, perched on top of my trap, just twitching it's little nose and whiskers at me. Now what was I going to do? I didn't want to touch the thing and I didn't want to kill it - that was the traps job. But I couldn't just let it go so that it could wander my counters late at night, leaving nothing but little trails of poop to remind me that he was still around.

So I did what any crazy, desperate person would do. I got the vacuum cleaner and made my husband attempt to suck him up, where he would have a nice, safe home until we could dump him into the garbage can outside, preferably dead over alive.

But it didn't work because, ah-ha!, we had caught that mouse, it just wasn't caught very well. His little hand had been caught by the trap and he was stuck. I kinda felt bad at that point for trying to suck him up into the vacuum cleaner (and a little stupid for not realizing why he hadn't run off during all this commotion) but we were still stuck with a live mouse, on our counter and I still had no idea what to do about it.

My husband, who I'm fairly certain was beyond me jumping up and down and screaming in his ear at this point, reached over, picked him up by the tail, released the trap and put him in a plastic, zip-lock bag and then attempted to hand it to me, saying 'Here'. I, of course, refused the bag and made my husband get rid of it. I told him I didn't want to know what he did, or how he did it, just that as long as it was out of sight and I didn't have to deal with it, anything was fine.

Of course, my husband being the softy that he is was all like, "Well I'm not going to be the one that kills him!". I think the poor guy literally just got put into the garbage can in his little plastic bag and if he didn't suffocate, he will probably be back. Hopefully the trap will get him this time so that we don't have to.

The worst part of it all is that I literally acted like I was two, woke everyone up in the house, got the dogs running and barking, and every time I would scream or get too excited, I would scare Henry and he would start to scream too.

If only the neighbors could have seen. They'd boot us into the crazy part of the neighborhood for sure.