I wanted to restart a blog and call it City Mom/ Country Mom but I don't have the energy to reregister and start over so I'm just continuing, afterall, it's all under the auspices of motherhood. It's just now I'm in the country, at long last.
Today I spent the better part of my morning vaccuuming my minivan. Moms in the DC metro area will all attest to the fact that we spend more time in our car than in our home. This is due, in part, to the tragic type-A moms that have overrun this once gentele Southern area and in part due to the horrendous traffic. Kids eat meals, change outfits, and do homework while enroute to the next activity. From sunrise until well after sunset.
Imagine my surprise when I opened the door to my minihome and found the tell tale signs of mouse infestation. (I know what this is because once month after moving into our Little House in the Country, we had a mouse problem). Signs of a mouse problem include shredded paper and poo. The more poo, the bigger the problem.
My car had been empty of people for about 12 hours. I have no idea if the mouse had been joy-riding with us to taekwondo the night before or if he had hopped in for an early morning snack of Wendy's french fries.
Let me explain that I am absolutely astonished that I haven't had a mouse infestation before now. Our four kids liter the car with chocolate milk bottles, chicken nuggets, goldfish, animal crackers, M&M's, french fries - and that's just what I found on the floor the day I discovered the mouse infestation. It's truly gross. And I normally clean the car out once a month but since we had just moved and were remodeling our kitchen, I just hasn't gotten around to it.
Alas.
So yesterday, I smeared some organic peanut butter on a mousetrap and put it in the car on the floor on the driver's side. As evening fell and there was still no mouse, I moved the trap to the passenger side thinking that maybe there was more to be explored from that side. This morning, I checked the trap and I could swear I was suddenly in a cartoon. I was Tom and the mouse was Jerry, mocking me, by carefully licking out ALL the peanut butter from the trap WITHOUT springing it. Mind you, I could hardly get any peanut butter on the little trap lever without setting it off and somehow that mouse, managed to lick it clean.
So my eyes bugged out of my head and steam came out of my ears. I'm pretty sure my face turned red and I had a thought balloon of me chasing the mouse with a mallot and smashing it to pieces.
I re-peanut buttered the trap and set it in the car again. Through out this entire mouse incident, mind you, our car is not drivable. So I'm driving our old beater farm truck around. It's an Isuzu Trooper with 200,000 miles on it. You can hear it coming three miles away and by the time it has covered those three miles it's used five gallons of gas.
But I digress.
Fortunately, second time was a charm. The following morning, I walked to the swagga wagon and the mouse had been iced. It's a lovely thing - a dead mouse. The kids were excited until they saw it and proclaimed it to be a "baby mouse" and called us mean for killing it. Trying to reason with preschoolers is impossible. If it looks small, it must be a baby ergo, the mouse was a baby.
I don't want to think about what will happen when we serve their pet rooster for dinner.
