A tale of eight mice.

We’re not even city folk.

My husband and I are your bog-standard, run-of-the-mill suburban people. We could deal with the occasional cockroach and the tui who would swoop too low, close to brushing our heads. The tunnelweb spiders at our old place weren’t too pleasant and there were plenty of daddy long legs in the corners. Once, a daddy long legs (do you ever read the word “daddy long legs”and wonder if it’s actually a real name? I do.) even had babies up in the corner of our bathroom. And did I ever mention on here the slugs in the washing machine? It was as gross as it sounds.

Anyway, us feeble vegetarians are very mediocre at dealing with creatures big or small, both if it involves us ducking and hiding, or doing the old jar-and-paper removal. And we definitely aren’t well-equipped to deal with rodents. It’s weird though, because both my husband and I had pet rodents growing up. But I guess it’s kind of different when they aren’t called Raisin and they freely run around your house at night.

Living rurally has introduced us to our new friends: mice. A few nights in, having finally wrangled the kiddos to bed, we stayed up for a bit talking in hushed tones, not wanting to start a cascade of wake-ups. And that’s when we heard the scuttling. And the cheeping. And then we knew that it wasn’t just us calling the cottage home.

Previously, we’ve dealt with one mouse. Our first baby was about a week old, and we felt swamped and overwhelmed with having a newborn and being first time parents. When we discovered the mouse, we freaked out to say the least. We were already in a state of perpetual freaking-out-ness from having a baby only a week prior, and seeing the mouse in our tiny kitchen set us over the edge. We called my husband’s mum at 7:00 am in the morning because we were, quite frankly, useless, and asked her to come over to deal with it. And she did. And we were so grateful because everything was a bit too much, so much so that a mere mouse unhinged us. She showed us how to set traps and use bait. It was the bait (though we made the mistake of not nailing the blocks down inside the roof, so we had a few days of very loud mouse soccer first) that got to the end of the mouse problem and that was that.

Or so we thought. Until moving here at least. Within one week, we caught eight mice.

The first one scared us. Our silly, little, wimpy hearts. We heard it, got scared, and my husband did the delicate job of the peanut butter smearing. We have a deal, you see. He sets the traps and I remove the bodies  (the traps are jumpy, which in turn makes me jumpy!). 

One morning at about 4:30 am, I could hear a furious scraping noise outside our bedroom door. I looked out and saw a mouse running around with a trap attached to its tail. This was a definite fml moment; why did the universe land us with rescuing a mouse that we were embarrassingly uneasy around? The traps are meant to kill them, not maim and traumatise the poor things! And now we had the responsibility of helping it, such fun! 

So I crept into our toddler’s bedroom where my husband was asleep and we made up an elaborate plan of removal and release, somehow without waking up either child in our 50 sqm humble abode. I’d do the box capturing and he’d do the tail releasing. What fun jobs we had! Anyway, once I turned the light on and could see the poor wee thing properly, it was a lot less scary. He was terrified and rightfully so; he was so little. They seem to sound a lot louder than they are. Anyway, I somehow managed to get him into the box and my husband very carefully took him outside (all while wearing some women’s size 5 Skelkerup Redbands that we found by the door, so he was clumsily walking around like a drunk antelope on stilts). He then used a broom handle to free the poor thing and we watched as the mouse scurried off into the grass.

And then there were seven more. Only one more required freeing (we have since replaced those traps) and the rest just required disposal. With each mouse, we kind of evolved with less fear. From feeble, ick-let’s-take-20-minutes-for-two-of-us-to-deal-with-one mouse, to a quick one minute dispose and reset of the trap, like some sort of professional, yet highly inefficient exterminators. Granted, my husband is still the one to reset the traps, but we are now remarkably less wimpy vegetarians. Nothing like a few mice to force you beyond your comfort zone. We even send each other cute texts now, like “just caught another one!”, “dead or alive?”, “dead *insert fist bump emoji”.

If this isn’t #couplegoals for being together six years, then I don’t know what is.

When I wrote about not being sure what to write about now, dead mice weren’t really on my radar. But here we are. May the poor, wee things please just keep their homes outside ours? Although we’re much better at managing our hit list now, we still don’t like doing it.