Mouse in the House

One dark night, as the kids were tucked snugly in their beds, and Cody and I sat in on the couch watching a movie, we were introduced to the little mouse who resided in our house. We were watching the movie, Contagion, which will make you want to constantly wash your hands and wear masks everywhere, when Cody suddenly said, "What was that?"
I had been watching the TV, so I told him is was Gwyneth Paltrow dying.
"Is that what I think it is?" he said, ignoring my uber-smart commentary. I didn't know what he was talking about. "I think I saw a mouse run underneath the TV hutch." Groan.
We got up to check and the startled mouse ran out from under the TV hutch directly under the door into the closet under the stairs. Trapped.

At this point, I was pretty calm but majorly grossed out. A mouse in the house. So disgusting. We haven't had any mice in any of our houses (that we were aware of) since we had been married. Cody, however, is grossed out, afraid, and suddenly all reason leaves him. "What do we do? What do we do?" he asks, hopping around gingerly like a Nancy. He insisted that he had never had mouse in his house before, ever. Baloney. He probably has, he just didn't know about it because his parents took care of it.

Now we were the parents. We needed to take care of it. To me, the answer was simple. There was no escaping the closet except back out under the door, so we stuffed a towel under the door and lined it with heavy ammunition buckets to make sure the mouse couldn't push his way out. He was trapped in there. Now, to me, the next step seemed simple. Cody needed to go the store to buy mouse traps. We'd slide the mousetrap in the closet and wait for the mouse to catch himself.

But to Cody, the solution was not quite as simple. Cody has a little bit of Clark Griswold in him, so he decided he didn't want to drive all the way into town at 10 o'clock at night. He is a make-it-happen kind of guy so he goes out into the garage and comes back in a couple of minutes with his big, tall fishing boots on, a fishing net, and a five gallon white bucket in his hands.

"So. . .watcha gonna do, Codeman?"

I think his plan is to capture the mouse inside the white bucket, but I seriously didn't think that would happen. First off, Cody hopped around every time he saw the mouse, squirming like girl. He wasn't going to get close enough to catch that mouse. Second, that mouse was in the closet under the stairs, which had a bunch of boxes for the mouse to climb and hide in. I told Cody my doubts immediately. But that wasn't Cody's plan.

He was going to go in there, with his big, rubber, protective boots to keep his toes mouse-bite free, and smash the mouse with the bottom of the white bucket, while I stood outside the door with the fishing net to catch the mouse if it ran out. Now, tell me that isn't straight up Clark Griswold. I told him he was too big of a Susan to go in there with that mouse hiding in the boxes, but the use of a girl name seemed to steel his resolve to prove me wrong. He peeked in the closet, saw the tall piles of boxes, and allowed himself to be talked into going to the store to buy mouse traps.

He came home from the store 30 minutes later with about 10 different kinds of traps. And by golly, we caught the sucker.

As a side note, Claire has decided she is an animal lover, therefore she fights daily for the rights and safety of all animals. So when she saw the mouse traps in our house, she started in with an impassioned plea to burn all the mousetraps because it wasn't right to kill the mouse. It even ended up with her in tears when I refused to get rid of the traps.

So I guess she isn't going to be her dad's hunting partner, after all.