The mice have moved in

Our next door neighbour has had mice on and off for a while but the mice have decided to get a take a bit more of a risk and travel further afield into our house. We've heard scratching under the floorboards a while ago but hubbie saw a little mouse scruying across our floor a few weeks ago. Off I got to the mouse catching shop and I had a lengthy discussion withe the assistant about humane and more drastic measures to get rid of the mice. I decided I didn't want to catch the mice and let them free to run wild in a field as a) we're not near any fields and b) they're trespassing in our house so they need to face the consequences and let all their friends know our house is out of bounds. So I went for the "not very nice" option. After cleaning under all nooks and crannies and banning the children from eating any food whilst wandering around we put down mouse traps under the kitchen cupboards. I did think they'd packed up and gone on holiday (see Ancedotes of a Manic Mum) as now all our food is in a million containers. But a few nights ago came down the kitchen to be greeted by a grey mouse having a party. My scream actually made it jump in the air, we then found a dead mouse under the kitchen cupboards. Hence a long discussion with hubbie about whether the dead mouse was the same mouse I'd seen 5 minutes before as it was so scared that it had run into the mouse trap by accident. Hubbie was sure that it had been there a while but would not conduct a post-mortem. The next morning the boys wanted to see the dead mouse, so I tried to pick up the corpse but its little beady eyes were looking at me so had to get hubbie to show them. Son 2 then wanted to play with it, ah gross!! Hopefully they've gone but will keep you all posted.