Eek! A mouse!!!

So I have a new baby, right? And that means I don't get as much sleep, right? Well, I would have been getting more lately, except that I've been kept up all night by a creature in my house! Right about the time my heart rate goes back to normal, it makes a huge noise somewhere, and I get freaked out and can't sleep again. It's been pretty rotten.

So the other night/morning I was talking to one of my East Coast relatives at 5:30 am (9:30 for her), while perched on a chair in the middle of my kitchen, watching. And I see it! It's a small, golden mouse. It's after the dog's food bowl (which is empty) and it's scared to death of me.

Now I know what it is, and it's not so scary. Considering our neighbors, I really hadn't been sure what they let into our house. Oh, and before you think I'm just picking on them, I was up the night the critter got in. It came through the wall we share with our terribad new neighbors. I heard it make a racket as it scurried it's way in, and I was pretty sure that since it had fallen out of the wall from a fair height it wouldn't be able to get back in.

But now I knew it was just a mouse. I told Bryan when he woke up, and we decided to get a Have-A-Heart trap to catch it. Well, just in case you live here and ever wonder, no one sells Have-A-Heart traps any more. I called 4 stores before I found an Ace Hardware that had them. So I go in to buy it, and they are $18.00 for one tiny little mouse trap. Considering Bryan's job situation, I called him, and we counseled together, and sadly, we decided that one little mouse's life wasn't worth $18 to us. I cringed and bought a $1.50 snap trap, came home, and passed off the horrendous item and chore to Bryan.

Now here's what really gets me: I kill mice all the time!!!! I have been tossing them into snake cages since before I can remember doing it. But somehow, knowing that the circle of life must go on and the mouse must be eaten if my beloved snake is to live is different in my mind than mercilessly killing a mouse just because I don't want it eating my food and chewing my electronics. However, preventing that was - of course - the more reasonable thing to do, and so the traps were set. Bryan was kind enough to remind me to not look if I heard it go off. Not that I really needed the reminder, I felt bad enough just for buying them, let alone seeing the result.

Two nights ago, Bryan and I are awake late, and what do we hear? Yes, the trap snapped. Bryan got up, got the trap, and threw it in the trash!!!! I howled in protest, made him take it out, bag it up, and dispose of it properly - all while covering my eyes with my hands. If there will be no living mice in my kitchen, there will be no dead ones either!!!! And I don't think I was being entirely unreasonable: I had just taken the trash out, and there was absolutely NO way I was letting a poor dead mouse sit in my kitchen trash until the next time the trash went out.

And so it was, that the event was properly taken care of. There is no longer a mouse in my house. My sanity, and that of the dog, is once again intact. But I still feel bad that I killed it.... and there's no snake around to be happy about it.