Mouse in the house

One of the joys of having a new baby in the house is getting up at all hours to feed him. I haven't seen 2 a.m. this often since I was in college. But if it hadn't been for these night time feeds, we would not have discovered our nonpaying tenant. We have a mouse in our house.

I first saw it about 4 weeks ago. I switched on the kitchen light in the middle of the night and saw a small shadow race across the floor. I thought it must have just been a shadow.

A few days later, the same thing happened again, only this time, the shadow had a tail and ran under the dishwasher. A mouse!

I told Gareth he would need to take care of this. Mouse removal is clearly a husband/father duty. But he did not immediately take care of it - I suppose because he's been busy doing everything for the household short of breastfeeding the baby. The mouse must have heard that we were going to come after it though, because he laid low for awhile there.

And then he reappeared this week. He's back, and he's bolder. I saw him race across the living room floor while we were watching tv the other night. And then when I was up at 2:30 last night, I saw him run from the living room, around the dining table, and into the kitchen. He ran around the dining chairs like he had done it a thousand times, like it was a well-travelled route back to home base. This mouse has gotten too comfortable. He must be dealt with.

I said to Gareth this morning that, while not happy to have pests of any kind living in our house, the mouse is heaps better than the cockroaches we had in Arizona. There are enormous, flying cockroaches in Arizona. We would be woken at night by the cat meowing at them (a good cat would have killed the roach; ours just alerted us to its presence and waited for us to smack it with a shoe.) There are few things more gruesome than a giant roach whizzing by your head, or the loud crunch of its body when you smash it dead. (Shudder.) I had no urge to retch when I saw the little mouse. I did not want to scream, or jump up on a chair, or wake up Gareth to save me. I just thought, "A mouse. huh."

Gareth pointed out, though, that the cuteness of mice will make it harder to kill them. True, I said, that will probably make it harder for you... When it's time to kill the mouse, I will probably be busy nursing the boy.

(Incidentally, World Breastfeeding Week just ended, and August is National Breastfeeding Month in the U.S. "Breastfeeding: it's what your bazongas are for." Thanks to Cara for the link.)