Jan 13, 2016

Dear Mickey Mouse,
      I would really appreciate it if you could ask your cousins to stay at your house.  Even though they are kind of cute, I really don't enjoy the messes they keep making all over my house.
                                                           Sincerely,
                                                       A grossed out momma

The mice do make for some interesting moments, but really!!!  I don't like finding mouse poop throughout my house!  Especially not my kitchen counters!  And having our pencil/notepad/etc drawer chewed to pieces is very annoying!!  We first found traces of poop when we were cleaning up the Christmas decorations.  We are wondering if they had been in the basement and were in those boxes when we brought them up, cuz shortly after we found some mouse droppings when we moved those boxes out of the front entryway and back downstairs we also found some in the half bathroom and in the kitchen!  Yuck!  Since I've cleaned it up we have mostly just found it in the kitchen.  One more time we found it in the half bathroom and also I found 1 lone dropping in Aspen's drawer, how did it get there?!?!?  That was the day Ben got a lovely text at work saying I was about to buy a cat (he hates cats!)  And then when he got home from work I had a few different sites pulled up with ways to keep rodents out of your house, and yes I read them all to him and then nagged him to take care of the list of things that it said to do so that no more mice would be able to get into our house and we could just worry about ridding our house of the ones that were already here.  He loves when he comes home to stuff like that....  I'm sure.  Well when I found the droppings on the kitchen counter we started keeping anything food wise on the island since that was the one counter we had not found droppings on, and for a day or two we pretty much didn't use the rest of our counter space because I didn't have the energy to disinfect them yet and didn't want to take all that time just to have to do it the next day if there was more.  Ben set up several mouse traps and it took a couple days before we caught one.  Hunter actually almost touched one before we ever caught one!  He went to get a pencil out of the drawer I mentioned above and the mouse was sitting in the drawer!  I was turned the other way when Hunter said, "What is that?!"  And then the mouse jumped out and ran under the dishwasher.  That's when we found out that they had destroyed that drawer.  When I cleaned it out I threw away a lot of stuff!  Since they tell you not to change cat litter when you are pregnant it made me really nervous to be cleaning up mouse pee and poop, so I literally used a disinfectant wipe on everything in that drawer that was kept, like I said I threw away a lot of it!  Every pencil, pen and notepad that wasn't very badly destroyed was only kept once I gave it a good wipe down with a wipe, and the drawer itself was wiped down several times with new wipes each time to make sure I really got it clean!
The day after Hunter spotted the mouse in the drawer is when we finally caught one, it was pretty big for a mouse.  Then the next day while me and the kids were eating breakfast I kept thinking I was hearing a squeaking, at first I thought it was one of them with a plugged up nose, then I had them all be quite and heard it coming from behind me.  So I checked our trap under the sink and sure enough there was another mouse, not quite as big as the first but still full grown.  Then the next day we caught 3 baby mice.  By this point we were feeling pretty good about how many we had caught, we still left traps out but this was the day I ended up disinfecting the drawer and all the counters very thoroughly, it was still a day or two before I started feeling OK about putting our food products (like bread that they can chew right through the bag) back over onto those counters.  But I must tell you trying to keep all of the bread and the treats we still had from Christmas on the island, where my sewing machine is set up and our mail pile is, as well as cooking on there, was getting to be a joke!
We didn't see anymore traces of mice for a few days so we were feeling pretty good about how many we had caught.  Then one night I was laying down while Ben started taking the trash out for trash night.  The kids were all already in bed asleep so I was pretty surprised when I started to hear a scuffle from Ben.  My curiosity got my tired body off the bed and made it to our doorway when I saw Ben in the hallway.  He was staring at me, I stared back for a second, looked down and saw a mouse not moving on the floor, I looked back up and said, "Watcha doin?" with a grin, he grinned back.  When he went to take the trash out from under the sink he noticed that we had caught another mouse in the trap under there, and while he was paying attention to that another one jumped out of the trash can!  That's when the scuffle happened, he had kicked it once and chased it, then ended up stomping on it in the hallway!  So gross, but I was very grateful there were no guts, he manged to stomp on it hard enough to kill it but not enough to make a mess, still disinfecting wipes were again brought out and the floor cleaned with those to be safe even though there was nothing to be seen on the floor!
I'm glad to say since then we haven't seen traces of mice, hopefully 7 mice is all of them!  And hopefully with the silicone Ben has filled in any spot I deemed necessary we won't be getting anymore unwanted visitors.  It's still probably going to take awhile for me to not think every brownish or blackish small sized anything on my floor is mouse droppings though.  Unfortunately with our young kiddos our floors have stuff on them a lot!  So I still have many moments of panic thinking that mice have found their way in again.  Yuck!