A Thanksgiving Visit From…

A mouse!

On the eve of Thanksgiving I started to prep some of my side dishes. I thought this would help eliminate the head ache of preparing everything the day of. I started boiling my golden yellow potatoes for my favorite The Pioneer Woman Creamy Mashed Potatoes, and then after that my sweet potatoes for my Ruth’s Chris Sweet Potato Casserole. These side dishes work wonders because you can prepare ahead and refrigerate until needed.

The next thing on my list was to make my family’s pumpkin roll. I needed a sheet pan for this and reached underneath my stove (you know, the awesome drawer with extra storage for those larger pans) and low and behold there was a itsy bitsy gray mouse sitting there! I about peed my pants.

So what do I do? I jumped up on my counter and waited. My husband and daughter were out and about getting some early Christmas shopping done. I probably called my husband 15-20 times in a row until he picked up. He said he would be home in 15 mins. 15 minutes later…still no husband. An hour later…I’m still sitting on the counter.

Why did I wait and hour?

Here is my reasoning:

1. I wanted to make sure that little critter would not escape into my bed or any other comfortable place of mine.
2. I thought my terrier dogs with hunting instincts would save me.  That night they failed me.
3. I am terrified of mice. I am terrified of mice.

While sitting on the counter terrified of walking anywhere and a lot of time to think I realized some valuable information.

1. The week of, I had found small pieces of dog food in the pans under the oven. I just assumed it was my three year old making more messes. This wasn’t the first time I’ve found dog food in my oven.
2. A week before, I had found tiny little chew marks in our pantry on our food items. I had told my husband that I thought there was a mouse in there but he didn’t believe a mouse could climb up 4-5 shelves. That was just impossible. (And yes, I did throw everything away)
3. Every now and then I would find little mice poops in the bottom cabinets.
4. A couple of months ago I turned on my oven and it started smoking really bad. I opened it up to see if there was anything burning–nothing. I grabbed a flash light and inside where the broiler sits were hand fulls of dog food. At this time I thought it was clearly my daughter pouring dog food down into the oven–I was wrong.

My husband finally came home to save the day. Well kinda…either that or to destroy our kitchen.

He looked down into the bottom oven drawer and said “There’s no mouse in here” and as soon as he moved the top pan out popped the mouse. The pans went flying, I started screaming, our daughter started crying and our dogs started barking. If the mouse wasn’t scared yet I’m sure it was with all the noise we were making.

During that time the mouse made its way to the back of the oven. So what do we do? We pulled the oven out. The mouse was hiding somewhere inside the oven. I was disgusted thinking about all the times I have used those pans and all the wonderful delicious meals I’ve made using those pans. I’m still recovering a little from this incident. Wouldn’t you?

To our surprise  that little mouse had been living in the back of our oven for who knows how long. I knew it! It had been storing full size pieces of dog food and small crumbs–a couple of hand fulls to be exact! We set traps all along the bottom of the oven and barricaded any area we thought it could escape from. My husband started tipping, pounding  anything to make movement and scare the mouse of out there and it wouldn’t budge. So we waited. Slowly the mouse crawled down the side of the oven and noticed we set a trap there and he ran back up. Frustrated! At this point we had already unscrewed the top and back of the oven and we still couldn’t see or get the mouse out.

We waited…

and we waited some more…

Finally that little bugger ran out the other side, missed both the other traps and headed straight for our dishwasher. It didn’t help that I screamed and stood there watching the mouse escape because that was my job to smack him on that side of the oven if it appeared. My husband wasn’t too happy with me at this point. Like I said I’m terrified of mice.

 We pulled out the dishwasher and it was curled up in the corner. My husband tried a few attempts to hit him with the broom but it kept running and then discovered a small hole where the electrics went from the dishwasher to under the sink cabinets. He ran back and forth a few times making it hard to catch him. We placed more traps down. As my husband was trying to hit him he got away AGAIN! He ran along the molding and headed straight for our laundry room.

At this point I told my husband if we don’t catch him tonight I am not cooking anything for our Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow. I was not going to be anywhere near the mouse.

Our laundry room is quite small so to try and pull the washer and dryer out to find the mouse was pointless. So we put a couple of traps in there with some yummy cheese and gave up for the night. We made sure every crack  was completely blocked.

So we waited some more…until the next morning.

Guess what? We caught that little sucker! Poor thing but happy me and my happy mouse free home.