The Mouse Is Gone!!!

For those of you who don't know, we have had an unwanted visitor in our house for the last couple of weeks. I discovered this on the Saturday before Christmas when I pulled out a pan to make breakfast. Inside the pan I found that lovely sign that tells you that you have a mouse living in your cupboard. You know what I'm talking about, mouse poop. I know it hadn't been there too long because I am in these cupboards regularly and it wasn't there before. Anyway, after that I started finding more of it the more I looked, and believe me, I was looking everywhere to try and figure out the extent of our problem. Luckily, the mouse seemed to be staying in the kitchen and only in the lower cupboards and underneath the stove. So we started setting traps. We put regular traps in the cupboards under the sink and next to the dishwasher where we found most of the poop and glue traps with a little bit of peanut butter on them under the stove where the regular traps couldn't fit and function. On Christmas Eve we had our first hit. Unfortunately I wouldn't call it successful. We keep our cute little dog Millie kennelled at night. On Christmas Eve morning I slept in and asked the kids to take Millie out to go potty. Normally this would not be a problem, however, during the night this sneaky little mouse found the glue trap and decided to escape rather than meet a cruel death. He dragged the glue trap out from under the stove and then when he figured he had no other option, he chewed his own leg off to break free. Since I was not up and in the kitchen like I normally would be, I did not see this problem. Millie did. She quickly found the glue trap with the very enticing peanut butter that was sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor and thought she had hit the mother load. I had to cut all of the glue out of her fur. It was not pretty. The kids were disgusted by the fact that Millie was that close to a chewed off mouse foot and refused to get too close to her until she had a bath later that day. After this incident we named our unwanted friend Tripod for obvious reasons. About 2 weeks later tripod found the glue trap again and escaped again leaving a good portion of his fur behind. Luckily I discovered the glue trap in the middle of the kitchen floor before we let Millie out. On Saturday morning Nelson was having a hard time getting the bottom drawer in the kitchen to close so he thought that maybe something had fallen back behind the drawer so he took it out and made quite an interesting discovery. The mouse had hidden almost a half a bag of dog food behind the drawer. I thought it was rather weird that Millie had been eating more food lately and then I found out that I wasn't the only one who had been filling the dog bowl. We spent most of the day Saturday pulling out the fridge and the stove and everything in the lower cupboards. I don't think my kitchen has been this clean since the day we moved in. Mike had the brilliant idea of setting the glue traps around Millie's food when we go to bed and then moving it in the morning. We did this on Saturday & Sunday night with no success. Today was another story. After we were done with family scripture study Nelson went to move the glue traps so that we could let Millie out for the day. He was a little bewildered when we discovered that they had been moved. Then he counted them and noticed that one of them was missing. We were looking everywhere for it. When we couldn't see it in the kitchen, Nelson and I started looking elsewhere around the house when we heard the loudest screams we have ever heard. Morgan and Josh found the mouse. They kept saying it was in plain sight right underneath the hooks in the kitchen. Nelson kept looking and couldn't find it. He even moved the coat that was in the way and still couldn't see it. He asked Morgan and Josh to come and show him, but they were still screaming and refused to come anywhere near the kitchen. I discovered the mouse stuck to glue trap and still very much alive hiding under the coat. Every time Nelson moved the coat out of the way he was also pushing the mouse out of the way.
Upon further inspection, we are pretty sure that tripod is the only unwanted guest. He had 3 legs and fur missing from most of his body. I was very glad that today was garbage day. He was carefully wrapped up in a plastic bag and deposited in the garbage can that was already out at the curb. The garbage man has been by and the mouse is officially gone!! While we are pretty sure that we only had one mouse here, we will continue to set the glue traps around the dog food for the next week or so just to make sure.