When I moved into this house in March, I discovered that although the previous owners had moved out, their tenants had not. Mice cannot be toilet trained, and I quickly grew tired of cleaning up their poop.<\/p>\n
So I bought a mouse trap, filled it with peanut butter and set it beside the mouse hole in the kitchen. Yes, I have an actual mouse hole in my kitchen. Not a cute dome-shaped thing like you see in the Tom and Jerry cartoons. No, this<\/em> hole is about eight inches long and one inch high, and is hidden inside the pantry. More of a mouse slit<\/em> than a hole, really.<\/p>\n However, I digress. I set up the mouse trap loaded with peanut butter, and I caught our furry little house mouse the first night. You can imagine my relief.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the poop continued to flow. So I set the trap again, and caught another mouse. Then another, and another…<\/p>\n Wouldn\u2019t it be funny, I thought, if I ended up catching 19 mice? Then I could write a Michelle Duggar-style blog post called \u201c19 mice and counting.\u201d Get it? Yes, I am sooooo clever.<\/p>\n Well, I was busy the day I caught the 19th mouse, so I didn\u2019t get the blog posting written up. No problem. I figured I\u2019d go for \u201c29 mice and counting.\u201d Assuming, of course, that I actually caught<\/em> 29 mice. Which was ridiculously unlikely. Right?<\/p>\n Well, last night I caught the 119th mouse, and I\u2019m writing this damned blog post in the hopes that I can make the rodent invasion stop. Somehow, my home has become the vortex of all things furry. I\u2019ve caught so many mice, I\u2019ve actually worn out the springs on three traps, and broken two more while trying to get them set. I now buy mouse traps in packs of six.<\/p>\n Last week, a fat, pregnant mouse waddled past me in the basement. It stopped about three feet from where I was standing and just sat there, staring off into space. When I tried to grab it, I discovered that even fat, pregnant mice can waddle faster than I can lunge. It disappeared into a crack in the wall. \u2028\u2028I now have three traps set in the kitchen, two in the basement and two in the attic. As I sit here, I can hear something chewing inside the wall behind my computer. They\u2019re baaaack…..<\/p>\n Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to my blog and you\u2019ll never miss my monthly posts (plus I\u2019ll send you a free copy of There\u2019s Nothing Wrong With Claudia<\/em> to say thanks). It\u2019s easy: Just enter your email address in the upper right corner of this page. I\u2019ll never sell, share, or rent your contact information, because I hate it when people do that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When I moved into this house in March, I discovered that although the previous owners had moved out, their tenants had not. Mice cannot be toilet trained, and I quickly grew tired of cleaning up their poop. So I bought a mouse trap, filled it with peanut butter and set it beside the mouse hole […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"yes","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny-bits"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions\/204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/brendakearns.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}