There’s a mouse in this house!

I walked into the kitchen one morning last week and my three year old looked at me with his swollen, morning face and his most concerned, adult expression and said in a most matter of fact manner, “There’s a mouse in this house!” What a way to start the day.

Now his revelation was not news to me. I’m well aware of the fact that the four of us are not the only ones living in our new house. We’ve got friends. The four-legged kind who like to rummage through my potholder drawer and leave nightly presents in the drip pans of my stove.

If I were a bit younger, I’d probably be too embarrassed to admit that we’re sharing our home with the nasty little vermin. The kind who prefer chocolate Easter eggs wrapped in brightly-colored foil buried deep in the cupboard to the wide variety of fruit left lying accessible on the counter. It’s true. But I’ve lived enough places and met enough people to know that most folks have had a mouse in their house, at one time or another. Of course that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

And having two little boys who don’t share my freakishly irrational fear of mice…well that just leads to far too many questions. Questions to which I’m not all that excited about sharing the answers, and answers that, quite frankly, they aren’t yet equipped to understand.

However, I began answering their questions, as mothers do, by letting the boys know that yes, we do have a mouse in this house. Immediately, Brisco’s eyes lit up and he said with pure joy, “I’m gonna give this wiggly truck to the mouse!” Heaven help us all if we have a mouse that big, but I just smiled and said, “OK” and went on to tell them only as much information as I felt they needed in order to stay out of trouble.

Dad had put a mouse pad in the back of their closet, but I made the mistake of calling it a “trap”. Well, I suppose to a couple of little boys-whose greatest hobby at Granma’s house is trapping kittens in an old rabbit cage-the term “mouse trap” brings to mind images that are much different than the one’s that come to mine. Which probably explains Cooper’s first question: “Is the mouse in the mouse trap?”

Immediately, they both ran to the closet, and Brisco yelled, “Close the door so it can’t get out!”

Of course this took some explaining and led to more intriguing questions such as, “Do mouses eat skin?” and “Where do mice come from?” I did my best to answer all their questions, but I’m not sure I did any of them justice. They spent the rest of the morning scouring the house for “holes” and “cracks” and reporting back to me concerning just where “these mouses might be getting themselves in”.

Thankfully, by the end of the day, they seemed to have forgotten all about our uninvited guests. They were no longer fascinated with “checking the traps” or “hunting them down”. No more “bat and mouse”. No more flashlight brigade. And that was just fine with me. Because no matter how long I live, or how many little boys go scurrying through my house, I’m still the kind of gal who yanks my feet off the floor and screams like a baby at the mere thought of even one pesky little mouse in my house.

And that’s All in a day’s work!