There is a mouse in our house.
There is at least one mouse in our house. Possibly more than one.
We have already found one mouse. It died while climbing through the fan vent in the laundry room, tragically. It appeared to have fallen a significant distance before sliding through the fan and landing on the vent.
I say it was tragic because it began to smell, thus making the laundry room unusable until the problem was identified. The situation further became tenuous when the body was discovered by Angie, who strongly dislikes rodents of any variety but holds unusual levels of contempt for dead mice that have the nerve to appear in the house without being invited.
After the mouse was discovered, the laundry room doors were closed, and the room was abandoned until I could return from work to remove the body. Upon returning home, I performed a small funeral ceremony and commended the body to the giant blue trashcan.
We thought nothing further of it and life went on as normal for a month or so.
And then we noticed the poop. Little mouse poop, deposited in specific places in the house, left as little surprises by our uninvited guests. Most disturbingly, they were left behind the microwave, and the toaster.
We can live in peace with animals, but we believe in boundaries between the species to maintain the health and hygiene of our family. A mouse (or several mice) partying on our kitchen counter in the middle of the night does not meet those requirements.
And so we decided to kill the mice.
This is a relatively simple thing, in theory. We purchased snap traps, and we own peanut butter. Since the most common place we find the mice droppings is the counter, we don’t need to worry about placing the traps in a place that Buddy cannot get to.
Unfortunately, we do need to make Alphie aware of the traps and convey the danger of playing with them.
And so we have a talk.
Of course, we have to explain to Alphie that a mouse is living in the house.
This leads to the inevitable questions, such as “Why?” and “But I don’t like mice crawling in my hair!” We were ready for these, and were able to sooth her by explaining the mouse was after food (and particularly her candy), but that the mouse was uninterested in the rest of the house.
And then we get to the part about the traps. I carefully explained her that I would use the traps to move the mouse outside, that the trap is dangerous to both she and Buddy, and that no-one but mommy and daddy should touch the traps.
We carefully avoided how the trap works, or that it will result in death. And Alphie seemed content with the idea that the traps would remove the mouse from the house, without pain or anguish, and that we would all live happily ever after.
I set the traps out, and Alphie watched me. I baited the trap with peanut butter, hoping that the mouse was big and fat and clumsy and wouldn’t just quietly lick all of the bait away without setting off the traps. Alphie did not see a demonstration of how the traps work; she did not see the violence of the spring mechanism.
As it turns out though, the mouse is smarter than I gave it credit, and it ate all the peanut butter bait without setting off any traps.
And so the following morning I was re-baiting and resetting the traps while Alphie watched. We bantered back and forth, with her thoughts always returning to the mouse. Again, I carefully shielded her from exactly how the trap works.
And as I lay the first trap out behind the microwave, Alphie pointed at it and said “And that is the part that bonks the mouse on the head!”
To which I said “Yes, yes it is” while Angie and I exchanged looks that said “How the hell does she know that?”
