We Have Mice, and So Do You
We have visitors in our house.
They are unwelcome.
They are UNadorable.
And they don’t clean up after themselves or make the beds.
OH SWEET LORD, I hope they haven’t been in our beds…
The mice are back. Back again. And I’m not happy about it.
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When You Give a Mouse an Inch
It’s probably gross to talk about your house having mice. But it’s our reality. And my Instagram has been filled with too many pictures of kids being clean and cute lately. So this is called balance.
I honestly don’t think the mice issue is because we’re filthy. I mean we aren’t clean, but we do sweep our floors and pick up leftover food. Yet still we are left with little critters making their way into our home with reckless abandon.
Glen has been all around the house spray foaming over any potential entry point and somehow they are finding a way. Points for persistence and ingenuity. Negative points for breaking and entering. Usually Glen is also in charge of checking the mouse traps we have scattered around the house. I don’t care if that is bowing to the patriarchy, I will fight for equality in other non rodent related ways.
Mickey Mouse Glen’s House
Lately, Glen’s rage against the mice has reached a fever pitch. He has purchased three different kinds of mouse traps and one night placed them every five feet in our kitchen. It was like a real life game of Mouse Trap but not nearly as fun.
As we sat in the living room the first night of a million mouse traps we heard a snap. GROSS, we got one…
Ten minutes later we heard a scurry and a slam. A slam?? Do we have deer in our kitchen? Angry, angry deer? Turns out another mouse had managed to drag a trap with him underneath the oven. I sat on the couch feeling mildly guilty while Glen handled that situation.
But not THAT guilty. I did birth his children, and Jack was huge.
The next day while I was working from home I thought that a squirrel was attacking our gutters. It’s happened before, so I wouldn’t have been shocked. Our squirrels aren’t the brightest crayons in the box. But when Glen came home he astutely realized that the call was coming from inside the house. A mouse was trying to break free out of our oven drawer… WORST…
Again, I moonwalked out of that room and I moonwalked fast.
Of Mice and (Wo)Men
While Glen has born the brunt of the mouse problem, I’ve had to suck it up and deal with the mice twice now. I think that basically makes me the bravest person alive. According to my mother it DEFINITELY does.
One instance was a live mouse not in a trap, and one instance was a mostly alive mouse in a trap. I don’t know which was worse.
With the live guy I opened up our trash compactor to put in a new trash bag and saw movement where there should NOT have been movement. Baby Ratatouille stared right up at me and I slammed the trash compactor shut. Looking at the clock I realized that I still had four hours before Glen was going to be back home from work. I couldn’t leave the mouse in our empty trash compactor for four hours…
I mean I could… but I like being married.
So I summoned up the courage of a thousand Moanas and came up with a plan. After selecting my second least favorite Tupperware, I opened up the compactor and threw the Tupperware down over the mouse. Then I slammed the compactor closed again. Just in case.
After I got my nerve back I grabbed a plastic place mat to slide under the Tupperware mouse. Screaming silently the entire time, I managed to get the place mat under the mouse and sprinted through the doors into the woods. Chucking the place mat Tupperware mouse as far as I could I then sprinted back into the house. And locked the door behind me.
Apparently neither Glen or I have any idea how rodents work.
Building a Better Mouse Trap
My second mouse extraction experience was with a mouse that was mostly dead. Or playing dead. Ugh, I don’t even know. This story is so disgusting.
Glen was away for business so I holding down the fort with the kids. Honestly if I had remembered that we had one of those sticky mouse traps on the floor I would have thrown it away and blamed one of the kids when Glen got back. But I forgot.
So after bedtime I came downstairs ready to pour a celebratory “got both kids to bed” glass of vino only to find a mousekatool hanging out on a sticky trap. I walked back into the other room hoping I was just dehydrated and hallucinating. I was not.
Using my same tried and true Tupperware strategy plus the addition of two garbage bags for opaqueness, I got this guy out of the house. It took me 45 minutes though because I had to take some breaks for dry heaving and self-pity.
We All Have Our Mice
The point of this post? Life isn’t always pretty. Sometimes life is full of mice in your house.
Scroll the ‘gram and you’re going to find plenty of beautiful pictures. Head over to LinkedIn and it’s going to be a whole lot of “Congratulations!” and check out this cool career thing I did. That’s fantastic! But if you are feeling like everything is a little less than perfect right now in your life or career, please remember that we all have our respective mice, even if we are not posting about them online.
Don’t worry, friend. You’re doing just fine.
Oh my goodness. I saw the title and totally thought this was going to be about PET mice! LOL. I raised mice when I was little. It was my first business. I bred them and sold them back to the pet store and they paid for their own food and everything. Maybe you should just catch them and visit the nearest pet shop, lol. They are really sweet when they aren’t unwanted house guests.
Ever the entrepreneur, Candy! But also… nope, nope, NOPE! These little buggers skeeve me out to no end. I’m sure they are lovely, but… NOPE!
If it makes you feel better we get them in our garage a lot. And my hubs is in full charge of handling that. If I see one on the trap I will literally text him saying he’s got a gift in the garage 🤣… One time after my car had been sitting in said garage for a week or so due to snow, we discovered that an a-hole mouse had made a nest INSIDE MY AIR FILTER inside my car. The smell was horrible. I am hoping that there was only the 1 baby that we found in the filter, but knock on wood haven’t had that problem again.
Ah!! I’ve totally had air filter mice too! These little guys are insane.
I’ve never had mice, but as someone who has pets in a small apartment (including an elderly, incontinent cat, which may be TMI but hey, we’re going there in this post), I can relate to this saga so much. Thank you for the realness and messiness of this post! It’s a much-needed dose of keeping-it-real during the holiday season. I hope the mice leave you soon, but if not, maybe Santa will bring you more Tupperware.
Oh, also, I had a freaking WASP infestation in my apartment when my baby was about six months old, and I like to think of that time as “the summer that Mama went insane.” Fond memories.
OMG! What did you do???
An exterminator came, who was no help at all because he couldn’t determine where the wasps were entering the apartment. We lined the windows with t-shirts and cloth to block any potential cracks where they could enter (pretty classy). The wasps remained, somehow, and only left when the seasons changed and it became too cold for them.
Nothing like spotting a dead wasp on the play mat next to your six month old baby to get that morning dose of pure adrenaline going! Or a dead mouse, most likely. I hope the mice saga has ended!