I woke up around 3am to nurse the baby back to sleep. I rolled over and he latched on. He was still mostly asleep as he suckled himself back into a peaceful oblivion. I heard some rustling from the other room and, the next thing I knew, Biscuit was crawling into my bed. As I tried to remind him that he couldn’t sleep with me (the last time he did, the baby crawled on top of him in his sleep and started wacking him), we heard some more rustling.
I thought it was C rolling over in his sleep.
I hoped it was C.
It wasn’t.
There was a mouse on the floor. I’m not exaggerating when I say the mice in my house are brave and disrespectful. They don’t care that there was just a little boy stomping on the floor or that there was a family trying to sleep. They come out of their homes in the floorboards and walls and come into MY home and run around like they own the place. I freaked out a little bit. I thought I was freaking out fairly quietly until my husband, who had woken up during my quiet freak out, told me I was scaring Biscuit. At least it scared Biscuit enough that he willingly went back to his own bed. Though his daddy did have to carry him because he didn’t want to accidentally step on a mouse.
The trap snapped shut later that day. (I called my husband to come in and get rid of it.)
The next day the older boys were upstairs gathering their dirty laundry and they decided to do a nice deed and gather the laundry from my room as well. The baby monitor base is in my room and I keep the receiver on all the time so I can hear most of what happens upstairs. I don’t think I needed the monitor at that point though. They made such a racket! When they came back downstairs, without the laundry, they told me they were trying to scare the mouse. C was stomping on the floor and Biscuit was yelling at it. Oh, and C hit it with Daddy’s sock. That’ll show that mouse not to mess with us!
Figuring this mouse was scared back into it’s hole, I decided to gather up the laundry myself. I was wrong. The mouse was hiding behind the baby’s clothing bin. I screamed and ran downstairs and texted Adam to come in and take care of it. He did. Wacked it with his belt and threw it outside, as our older two watched in awe. Those boys were playing “daddy vs mouse” the rest of the day.
Thinking we were done with mice for a while, I started to relax a bit. Until the very next day when C came to ask me what I wanted him to do with the baby mouse in front of the vacuum. I’m glad he didn’t seem concerned about it. But I was. I had to get him to repeat it several times to make sure I understood correctly. The baby mouse was dead, thankfully. But still, creepy! Since it was dead, I waited until Adam came in for lunch before asking him to throw it out. (You can imagine how entertaining my fear was to him.)
The day progressed as usual. And there were no signs of mice the next day. Until about 5pm when I walked into the living room. My heart still beats a little faster as I remember the feeling of seeing a dead mouse in the baby’s hands. I screamed. For quite a while. And I dove across the living room floor to my sweet little baby as he flapped this thing around and…. slowly…. brought it to his mouth. Still screaming, I managed to reach him before he made contact. There was no way I was going to touch the mouse so I picked up the baby and started shaking his arm to get him to release the mouse. Biscuit sat on the floor beside the baby and watched all of this with a look on his face that said, “What’s the big deal?”
I finally managed to shake the mouse out of the baby’s hand and it landed on the floor with a *thunk* and I ran out of the room. Wait a minute, it should have made more of a *splat* sound. I took a few deep breaths before I was finally able to speak. I asked Biscuit, “What’s going on?” He looked at me with those sweet, sparkly, fully innocent eyes and said, “It’s just a dinosaur mom.”
