Plagues and such

A few weeks ago we discovered that we have mice in our garage. I have heard some skittering about when I open up that door and then we noticed a hole chewed through the bottom of Brady's dog food bag. Okay. No problem. Live and let live I say. As long as they don't come in the house I'm going to pretend I don't know they exist.

But then a couple days ago I opened up the garage door to go out and although the light was off I could still see a little gray ball of fur bouncing around at my feet inches from the open doorway. I did what any nature loving, animal hugging girl would do. I screamed bloody murder and slammed the door as hard as I could. My big, strong hubby came along and opened the door and although he did not see the mouse, he did hear it and he heaved the big huge bag of dog food off the ground and put it on top of an empty fish tank we have sitting in the garage to get it off the floor and out of the reach of the little mousy paws and teeth. Problem solved.

Not quite. I can still hear them. Now, when I open the door I open and shut it quickly a few times before I go out while loudly telling the little mice that I better not see them when I turn on the light. Fast forward to today. I took the kids to the pool. We go through the garage to get our stroller with all of the pool stuff in it. I did my ritual door opening. No mice. They listen and obey. However, when we came home we entered the house through the garage door. I sent Jake and Emma ahead of me because I am their shirpa and I was busy hauling all of the gear from the stroller to the house.

Jake turns around and tells me "Look Mama! We have some cute little mousy pets!" I really thought he was just messing with me. And I thought he was stalling about going inside so I tell him "great! GO INSIDE." He did after repeating his story about the mice three times. We get in and Emma says "MAMA! The micey so cute!" So I said, "wait a second, where did you see mice?" She says "in the cage!" And Jake's all "SEE? I told you mom! There are three cute little brown mouses in that cage out there! Can we keep them? PLEASE?"

Ya'll. I had to open that door to see for myself. I did my door opening ritual. I looked out through a crack and into the abandoned fish tank. There they were. Sitting up on their little legs, whiskers twitching, just looking at me. A mama and two babies. And they were cute. I screamed and slammed the door shut. Then I called Mike and told him the news. He said "want to keep them? we can put em in Emma's room."

Ya'll. Mice carry the bubonic plague. Don't they? I hope I'm not falsely accusing them but I think mice are responsible for wiping out a big chunk of the human population years ago. I'm all for respecting all life forms and I don't want to kill the cute little mice, but I will not have them in my house! We need to come up with a plan for operation Mouse Relocation as soon as possible.

I confess I went out into the garage to take some pictures for the sake of the blog. First of all, there were only two mice in the tank at that point so I was a little freaked out. Secondly, it's hard to take pictures of something when you're too scared to get up close. Also, do you see the hole in the dog food bag? Clearly, these are not ordinary mice we are dealing with. They are problem solvers. And thinkers. And all the things I wish my kids would be.Trust me, these are pictures of the offenders. What do we do??