Place: My bedroom
Time: Last night
I was feeding Dylan and Elizabeth was playing with my yoga mat, which she does all the time.
Suddenly, she starts screaming bloody murder and jumps up onto the bed. I look to see what all the commotion is (she's a VERY dramatic child after all) and spot a tiny gray mouse scurrying away from the mat.
Me: Did that mouse jump at you?
Elizabeth: Yes. Scared me. Mouse.
After inspecting her for bites, I quickly surmised that the mouse must have been tangled up in the mat and leapt out as she unrolled it. No matter though, there was now a live mouse running around in my room.
I quickly enlisted the services of Baby, our junior cat (aka the orange one). He was worthless. Though he caught the scent of the mouse, he's clearly too well fed to care...a situation that will be remedied.
About an hour of sequestration on the bed later, the senior mouser Louie (aka the gray one) strolls into the room. I prompted him gently as to the location of the mouse he was eagerly sniffing (aka, I threw him in the direction of the critter and said "Louie get the mouse" - a phrase that would be repeated often through the night).
Louie is apparently also too well fed as he also declined pursuit.
Cut to three hours later. Bob comes home and is immediately dispatched to rid the bedroom of the mouse. The children and I have all gathered in the family room (i.e. as far away from the mouse as possible).
Bob searches the room, moves furniture, shakes out blankets, but comes up empty.
Cut to midnight the same night.
I'm sleeping. There is a rustling and a bustling.
I wake up to see Louie feeling his hunger and angrily stalking SOMETHING behind the entertainent center in my room. He is jumping from side to side, clearly trying to corner the mouse - which has conveniently reappeared while Bob is sleeping.
That doesn't last long.
I wake up Bob and make him help Louie. Meanwhile the mouse has skittered behind my dresser. Bob pulls the dresser away from the wall just enough to drop Louie behind it.
Louie makes quick work of the mouse, catching him in his fierce feline jaws and jumping behind the entertainment center, across the room, up onto my bed and back onto the floor and out the door - with Bob and his trusty mouse killing broom in hot pursuit.
Too late! Louie has already murdered the mouse! Bob is relegated to clean-up duty, for which the broom is also handily suited.
The case of the disappearing mouse is closed! And I can sleep easy, at least until the next damn mouse shows up!
PS. I amused myself today by telling Elizabeth "Look there's the mouse!!" and she'd freak out and scream and I'd laugh and tell her I was kidding and she'd laugh and say that was funny!
Repeat about 30 times today.
Ah, good times.
6 comments:
Wow, we have an eerily similar life at times. We too have a mouse in the house. Our cat brought it inside and it still scurries around upstairs. Our cat isn't doing anything about it either, the bastard.
Louie is our mouser and he will usually play with his prey to death. So we USUALLY find little mouse corpses which is still horrifying to me, but at least they are immobile.
It's the LIZARDS that he brings in alive and releases in the house, and that is only slightly less disgusting.
I'm still freaked out incidentally, and I'm checking everywhere for mice. I thought two rolled up mittens were mice yesterday. I'm traumatized.
Trust me, I know where you are coming from. We had a real mouser (Achilles) but he disappeared almost exactly a year ago. (We believe his demise was secondary to some non-pet-loving neighbors, but I'm not going to get into that here.) Hector, our other cat, is only a pseudo-mouser. He brings them in (frogs and birds too) but only plays with them. It's his own little catch-and-release program, only he releases them inside. It's awful.
We're still looking for that damn mouse, and it's been here since before Marcus was born. We have mouse sightings from time to time, but we're never fast enough. He's probably sitting under my chair right now... *shudder*
EW!
Trust me, I feel badly about teasing her, but it's so damn funny. If she didn't get the joke I would feel much worse, but she tries to pull it on me too.
This morning I asked her to throw away the drier lint and she tossed it in the trash can and said "Yay! Elizabeth did it!" and I said, "Was it a mouse?" and she went NUTS!
Ah, it was funny. Two minutes later she pointed to my feet and said "Mommy look! Mouse!"
So, she gets it.
She laughs.
OK, I'm horrible.
When I was a kid growing up in SoCal we had roof rats. They are just as lovely as they sound. And HUGE.
Anyway. It's sort of a misnomer since they lived in our attic and not on the roof.
We had the rat guy come and put down poison in the attic. Those jerky rats ate the poison, climbed into the walls and died there. Completely impossible to get them out unless you wanted to tear through the walls and destroy the house. So we endured a summer, A CALIFORNIA HOT SUMMER, with dead rats decomposing in the walls.
My mom put those Stick-Ups everywhere all over the house.
Now the smell of Stick-Ups makes me want to hurl.
I wrote about the experience last year.
I have to get some mouse traps this week.
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