The Mouse in the Pantry

We have mice. Every winter we have a problem with mice, but this winter they really outdid themselves. Partly because it's not even winter and they're a problem. Also because they went from "I'm pretty sure there's a mouse in here" to "I have found evidence of mice everywhere I look. And I kind of just want to burn the house down and move."

Yeh. Problem.

I put sticky traps in the pantry to catch as many mice as we could. Sticky traps are the glue-covered boards that mice get stuck fast as they walk across. We've had success with these in the past, and they're highly recommended by exterminators everywhere. So I put these things on the basement steps and in the pantry, trying to catch as many of those miniature rodents as possible. The very first night we got 2 mice. I know this because they left their fur behind on the glue board after making an escape.

Insert the stink eye here, directed toward the mice. Let's not mention the fact that they scored one and I am at a very fat goose egg.

Not to be deterred, I left the traps out in hopes that we'd get a whole new set of mice that weren't hip to my jive. I also put a blob of peanut butter in the center of the trap to lure the mice onto them. Mice can't resist peanut butter. Neither can Micah. He licked the peanut butter off the next morning. No worries. Dr. Google told me that the glue was non-toxic and that he'd have to actually eat the whole board for there to be any danger of damage. And the damage was mostly from gummed-up insides while waiting for the chewed up remains to pass.

Mice: 2
Me: 0

After that I ditched the glue boards because I realized they were not only useless but frustrating. Having to worry whether or not your kid going to die from mouse trap ingestion shouldn't ever happen, and on a lesser scale, I shouldn't have the danger of gluing my hand to the pantry shelf while scavenging for dinner.

Actually, the real reason I ditched the glue boards was this.

This is the basement steps. That is a case of soup stuck to a glue board. We do not keep cases of soup on the basement steps. We keep soup in the pantry, which is up the steps, around the corner, and behind a door. I am pretty sure soup doesn't wander around at night and was therefore inadvertently caught in one of my traps. Neither do I think mice would have carried a case of soup to their lair and then decided halfway down the steps that it was too heavy and left it. Glued to a trap.

This, people, is what life in our house is like. Things that make no sense in any world. And because I like to pretend that our lives are normal, I got rid of the glue boards.  And then I questioned the kids on WHAT THE HECK. Shockingly, we got a confession. This is rare.

There was a mouse sighting in the pantry. Some yahoo thought he'd just take care of that mouse by throwing a glue board at it. You and I and anyone with a brain can accurately guess that a mouse isn't going to sit there and wait for a cardboard trap to land on it, so it ran. Quickly. And the glue trap landed square on the case of soup. While mice can escape these things, soup cases cannot. To hide the evidence of stupidity, the soup was placed out of sight. Because just taking the cans out of soup out of the case and tossing the trap and other remains in the trash would have made far too much sense.

Mice: 3
Me: I have kids.