Monday, September 15, 2008

Mouse in the House

I have never (to my knowledge) lived in a house with resident mice. Cockroaches? Ants? House flies? Fruit flies? Spiders? Check. Mice? No way.

Until last week. Jim was off in Chatham on a company retreat and I was at home with the kids. Thursday night, I was sitting in the living room, knitting and watching Burn Notice. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move over by the radiator cover in front of our bay window. I turned my head to look more closely and saw a little brown mouse sitting in front of the TV. At almost exactly the same moment, he saw me and ran under the radiator as quick as a flash.

I was so stunned I couldn't move for almost a whole minute. All I could think was that the front door must be open and a mouse wandered in. I'm not afraid of mice per se, so I wasn't terrified, but the thought of a mouse running around, eating our food and potentially biting one of the kids made me VERY nervous. I was finally able to get up, and I immediately went to get the broom out of the kitchen.

I'm not really sure what I thought I was going to do with the broom. I think I had some vague plan to sort of sweep the mouse towards the open door and get him outside. Sadly, there were problems with my plan. As I approached the radiator, I could see that the front for was closed and locked. Clearly, the mouse had come from some other place in the house. Also, aside from moving the radiator cover and jabbing the broom around behind the radiator and underneath it, there wasn't much I could do to get the mouse out into the open. And, frankly, if I were a mouse, I would have stayed firmly beneath the radiator if a giant human started poking a broom near me. When the mouse failed to appear, I put the broom away and did what any rational gal would do -- I called my husband at his hotel two hours away and asked him to come home immediately to remove the mouse.

After assuring me that the mouse would not attack our children in the night, Jim opined that it was probably a field mouse who got in looking for shelter. It made sense. The weather was very cool last week. Jim has removed all of the siding from the house, and it could have left some points of access for mice to get in. Jim said we would buy traps on the weekend and get rid of the mouse. Somewhat reassured, I was able to finish up what I was doing and go to bed.

Now you have to understand something. We've lived here for almost 6 years. We've never seen mouse droppings. Nothing has ever been chewed as if by small creatures. I've never heard anything crawling around in the walls. Yes, there is sometimes a smell on the second floor when the wind blows that could be considered mouseish, but I always thought it was the remains of long dead things somewhere under the eaves. As a result, Jim's theory that a lone field mouse had gotten in seemed reasonable to me.

There was no sign of the mouse on Friday. The only thing unusual was the way Oskar spent the day sitting in front of the pie safe cabinet we have with an expectant look on his face. Since the pie safe is right next to the radiator, I tried poking my trusty broom behind and under the pie safe, but no mouse appeared. Jim came home, no mouse. We all went to bed with plans to buy some traps.

On Saturday morning, Lily and I got up and went to hang out in the living room. We were sitting on the couch reading when Lily suddenly said "Oskar found one of his toy mice!" Sure enough, there was a little mouse lying in the middle of the carpet, belly up. As Lily ran to get it, I yelled "Don't touch it! Don't touch it!" At almost the same time, Oskar came roaring into the room and started batting it about. Lily said "I think that might really be a live mouse, Mom! I didn't believe you when you said you saw a live mouse!"

Jim came down at that point and fished the very dead mouse from under the chair to dispose of it. Oskar was not thrilled to lose his new toy and had to be restrained in Jack's bedroom during the clean up. I was so pleased that Oskar was a mouser. All day long, we talked about how lucky we were that Oskar caught the lone field mouse almost immediately after it got in. Hurray!

That night, Jim went in to work. I sat in the living room working on some stitch markers for my store. Oskar came trotting right up to me and dropped a SECOND mouse on the floor at my feet. He looked as pleased as punch. Me, not so much.

This is clearly not a random mouse appearance. We clearly have some kind of mouse problem. Mouse No. 2 was a lot smaller than Mouse No. 1, suggesting it may be the offspring of Mouse No. 1. *Shudder* Since I heard Oskar barging around upstairs, I'm thinking that mouseish smell might be indicative of actual mice. After doing some research on the internet, I poked around upstairs looking for signs of mice. The only thing I found was the chewed up corner of a packing box under the eaves in my bedroom. It's been that way for some time and I always assumed it was from Maggie sharpening her claws or chewing the cardboard. Why? Because that's where Maggie spends 99.9% of her time. Now I'm wondering if there are mice living up there in Maggie's space and she's just been ignoring them all this time! Ugh.

Anyway, Oskar hasn't brought me any more vermin since Saturday night, so we'll see. In the mean time, I'll be busy mouse-proofing my house.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Time to clean out under the eaves!

Mom

cath said...

Hmmm, we had mice in the house (read, barn) we lived in in the Berkshires. We moved :P

Unknown said...

Well, there's been no sign of any further mice so far. When the weather cools down later in the week, I'm going to get under the eaves and look around with a flashlight and Oskar!