Mouse in the house – Part 2

I was convinced it was just the one mouse (you can read part 1 here).  I knew when and where the little bugger entered the house.  I set a mouse trap baited with delicious peanut butter behind the washing machine before I went to bed the night we saw the mouse.  I had no idea where it was at the time, still under the couch, back behind the shelf, in the laundry room, maybe even in my bedroom, but I had to put the trap somewhere safe from kids and a dog.

Rosie’s  dog crate is in the laundry room, and she sleeps there at night, with the laundry room door shut.  Can a mouse fit under a door?  If the mouse was elsewhere in the house, would it be able to flatten itself sufficiently enough to get under a door and into the laundry room?  Would it even want to with a dog in there, despite the fact that the dog was in her crate?  Rosie was rather interested in the area behind the washing machine before I put the trap down though, so Aaron and I decided that perhaps the mouse was back there anyway, and that’s where the trap went.  Best case scenario we caught a mouse, worst case we didn’t.  It was worth a try.

The next morning, I used Daniel’s light up Thomas toy to check behind the washing machine because I couldn’t find a flashlight and the light bulb in the laundry room needs to be changed. I wasn’t actually expecting to find anything so soon, but there it was, on the ground, head squished in a trap.  Good, that’s the end of that.

“What do you want for breakfast, kids?” I asked them after Aaron disposed of the mouse.

“RICE BUBBLES!”

I reached up towards the cereal cupboard near the stove and stopped dead in my tracks.

Standing there silent, I heard a light shuffling in the top of the oven, between the bottom of the burners and the top of the stove.  No way, I must be hearing things.  Or maybe it’s a cockroach….It can’t be….

With a wooden spoon, I pulled a burner up and prodded around under the top of the oven, half expecting to see a mouse darting around inside.  Nothing happened.  No noise, no rustling, no mouse or roach appearance.  Phew.

“Did I tell you there was a little mouse on the counter this morning?” Aaron told me when he got out of the shower.

So I wasn’t imagining it.  There was a mouse in the oven.

I pulled one of the burners up, used a towel to keep it up, and put a trap inside the top of the oven before shutting the blinds and closing all of the bedroom doors to make the house as dark as possible.  Do mice only move around when it’s dark? I don’t know, but it seemed more likely that I’d catch a mouse in the dark than in the light.  I left to drop Daniel off at daycare and Hannah off at school, hoping that in the hour I was gone, I would catch the mouse.

I did.  Except Aaron wasn’t home to dispose of it for me, so I had to do it myself.  I rebaited the trap with peanut butter and stuck it behind the bench top organics bin.  Surely there weren’t any more mice, but better safe than sorry.

The mouse I caught in the stove top

I put one in the garage too, and the washing machine trap was still behind the washing machine.

The next day, another cheeky mouse was in the trap on the kitchen counter behind the organics bin, and another one was in the garage trap.  Ugh, where were they all coming from?

After putting the mice in the bin, I reset the traps and put them back out.  It’s been a few days now and so far so good.  No mice.  Hopefully that means we got them all.

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Copyright 2014 Sheri Thomson