Lately I’ve been staying up late, working on blog posts for NaBloPoMo. Just me in front of the glowing computer screen, trying to “type my heart out.” The house is quiet, the kids and hubby are asleep. After I schedule the next day’s post, I shut down the computer and go around the house, making sure lights are off and doors are locked before I head off to bed.

Friday night, I just finished writing “Little Moments“. As I headed for the dark kitchen, I heard claws scrambling on the kitchen floor and saw a small shadow dash for the hole at the base of the dishwasher.

I flipped on the switch and freaked out in my head. I didn’t want to wake the kids. I was tempted to run upstairs and wake Ed, but he had to get up early the next morning for work. So I froze.

Seriously, I’m not the kind of woman who will stand on a chair and scream “EEK!” although at that moment I sure felt like it. That mouse was somewhere in the house, and I didn’t like it one bit. But there was nothing I could do about it. So I went to bed. And proceeded not to go to sleep. And when I finally did go to sleep, I had bad dreams about mice.

I think mice are really, really cute. But…even though they are cute, they just can’t be in the house! So I set some mousetraps where I knew the mouse had gotten in…the crawlspace right behind the kitchen sink. (Lily and Emmy wanted to lure the mouse back outside with the peanut butter jar. They strongly protested against the mousetraps!) I buy the kind of mousetraps that the mouse crawls into to get the bait, and then the trap snaps shut, kills the mouse, and then you can just throw the trap away without even seeing the dead mouse. Somehow that kind of trap seems to sanitize the whole mouse killing concept. It hides that fact that I killed a mouse. Which is good. (For me, not the mouse.)

The next night, that mouse was caught. And so ends our weekend mouse drama…but I still am keeping the mousetraps set up, just in case.