The mouse & me

Our house was in chaos first thing this morning. I had my usual routine, first one in the house up, showered and having breakfast, when I returned to the kitchen to put my plate in the sink and there was a mouse scampering for cover across our kitchen bench!

Squeals followed, with the mouse diving for cover behind our microwave which is in one corner of our kitchen bench. I bolt out of the kitchen, trying to find a torch and trying to see if anyone else is awake. Amy is (barely). Now Amy is not good with mice, at all. She's worse than me. After seeing a mouse at a bus stop in Copenhagen she was totally hysterical! Amy starts freaking out while I run back into the kitchen to see if the mouse is still behind the microwave.

Couldn't see much with our little pocket torch, but I assumed the mouse would have made a dash for it when I left the kitchen. Amy comes in after my reassurances it was gone, but refuses to let me move the microwave. Amy (slightly calmer) leaves the kitchen with her breakfast and I decide to pull the microwave away from the wall. Smart move Michelle.

The mouse was still there. I stand there, frozen, not sure of what to do, while the mouse sits there, frozen to its spot, unsure of what to do as well. In fact it looks so frozen that I begin to think its dead, from a heart attack or the sheer shock of meeting me first thing in the morning. I bump something on the bench, which jolts the mouse to life again and causes it to run in random directions across the kitchen bench again. More squealing follows. Mouse, completely freaked out at this stage, runs to the edge of the bench and does a kamikaze style jump down from the bench into the dishwasher. Yes, into the dishwasher. I had pulled the dishwasher door down when I first got into the kitchen and was halfway through removing dishes, so it was wide open.

By this time I run out of the kitchen and close the door, thinking of what we can do to catch the mouse and wondering if its going to run into my room (very close to kitchen). Down comes Steph O, who has just been woken up by Amy and the noise we're causing in the kitchen. 'If only we had a shovel!' she tells me as she walks into the kitchen. I come in behind her, asking her if she really would kill a mouse on the spot, rather than leave out a trap (to me a trap is bad enough to deal with). Mouse then leaps down from inside the dishwasher, momentarily onto the floor and then scurries between a gap in our skirting boards. Probably counting its lucky stars that it met me and not Steph O this morning.

Steph has now put mouse traps down and Amy and I are terrified of walking in one morning to see something we don't particularly want to see. I don't know what it is about mice, as much as I hate them and think they're dirty and pesky, I just couldn't stand there this morning and kill this tiny little mouse cowering in the corner.

Perhaps its because when my family last moved house we found a mouse in our kitchen, which ran behind our fridge. My Pop decided to help get it out and when moving the fridge away, inadvertently stood on the litte thing as it made a run for it. Thank god I didn't see the end result!