“I like Mouse Trap. You roll your dice, you move your mice and nobody get’s hurt.” – Bob the Tomato (Veggie Tales)

Good advice, Bob, except we don’t actually want the mouse to keep inhabiting in our kitchen.  Up until last night, we’ve been using old school mouse traps – we used what we had on hand (thanks to the previous owners of our house):

Time-tested devices that are supposed to permanently trap our furry little intruder  (read: neck-sapped/DOA).  However, these traps don’t work with ninja mice, which apparently is what we have living in our house.  Is anyone else picturing a cartoon mouse a-la Indiana Jones, trading a weighted bag of sand for a treasure to prevent the booby trap?  No?  Just me? Did I mention, that I set off one of these traps 3 different times with my shoe?  Anyway, the other night while watching TV we heard the trap trigger.  Noah went up to check (because I refuse to find a dead mouse in my kitchen), and what did he find?  An empty trap with missing bait (a piece of cheddar).  When I called up to the kitchen to ask if the mouse had been caught Noah replied, “No, but we’ve successfully fed it.”  The mouse was MIA but he did leave some fleas on the floor.  Apparently, the trap spooked the fleas and caused them to jump ship.  Three cheers for bubonic plague!  Ugh!  A little spray and at least they were dead.

Backtracking a little, Wednesday after picking-up Logan from his nanny’s, he and I went shopping for plastic containers in which to store food.  However, we didn’t get around to using them as we wanted to disinfect the pantry first and toss out anything the mouse got into.  Saturday night Noah spent an hour or so emptying the pantry and cleaning the shelves.  Turns out the mouse prefers Cheetos, Carnation Instant Breakfast and dried beans (one particular bean out of a variety of 15 – he actually made a little pile of the unwanted beans).  Once cleaned, Noah restocked the pantry, with a lot more empty shelves than when he started do to the amount of food we tossed.

Yesterday morning, our infiltrator was back and attacked a defenseless muffin mix package (honey bran, in case you were wondering).  Gah!  Noah went shopping again yesterday for more plastic bins (we should buy stock in Sterilite) and we packed all the food away.  However, these bins are currently just sitting on our kitchen floor as we have to, once again, disinfect the shelves.  Noah also bought a fancy new mouse trap, one that will prevent me from having to see – or tempt Lava to munch on a dead mouse:

Noah tried to buy some of these traps on Thursday but Ace was sold out.  That must mean they work well, right?  One trap was baited with peanut butter and placed on the floor next to the pantry.  The second trap was baited with bread and placed on a shelf in the pantry.  Finally, we thought, we should catch this varmint!  But alas, this morning, both traps were still empty.

And so, the hunt continues…