I called my mom yesterday to tell her my "scary story" of the day. Almost a month ago, I was out in the garage late at night, and I heard some rustling. I ran back into the house, and slammed the door. The rest of the family had come back from their trip a few days earlier. While they were gone, I noticed Max's bag of food, that we keep in the garage, had a rip in it. I was concerned, but I convinced myself that it had always been there, and I just hadn't noticed it before. Max also started to show a lot of interest in a hole leading under his dog house.
A few days later, Hubby came in, and he let me know that we did have something living in our garage. He had heard it, and started rummaging through the garage looking for it. He noticed several tears in the dog food bag. He set several sticky traps around the dog food bag, and he even put some dog food in the middle of them. The next day, there were several new rips in the dog food bag, and the traps had been pushed to the side. We brought the dog food into the house, and left the traps.
In the next month, the traps caught Allen, Michael and Me, but no animal. Hubby moved all the boxes in the garage, and he found a large nest of poop, flower bulbs, and dog food. The scat was to large to be a mouse, so I was hopeful that whatever was living in our garage would not make it into the house through any small holes.
It took me several weeks before I would go into the garage, and after that, I would only venture in with very sturdy shoes on. There was no sign of any animal for several weeks, and so Hubby convinced me that we had scared the pest away. Yesterday, I snuck into the garage while the kids were all downstairs playing, in my bare feet, to grab a popsicle. I saw movement and when I looked, I noticed that there was a mouse stuck to the glue trap. We had actually given up on catching anything, and we were so sick of having one of our own shoes stuck to the trap that we had thrown it into a bucket. The trap was old, dusty, and covered with spiders that had met their fate. I was concerned that it was no longer sticky enough to hold the mouse.
I left the mouse where it was, and came back into the house to call hubby. I told the kids, and they all had to run out to the garage to see it. They begged me to let it go, talked about keeping it an naming it, selling it to a pet store. ("But you guys, mice have diseases. The pet store wouldn't want them." "But the pet store can just give them rabies shots.") Michael decided that he wants to create a transporting mouse trap, that will not let the mice into the house, but will simply transport them to a nice grain-filled field. When Hubby came home, I asked him to go check on the mouse trap. He went out, and then came right back in to let me know that there were now 3 mice on our dusty trap.
He ended up taking the trap, and putting it into an ice cream bucket. He wanted to find something to kill the mice quickly, rather than just waiting for them to die of starvation. He ended up dumping in some paint thinner, and then putting back on the lid. The paint thinner dissolved the glue on the trap, and soon we had three mice, running around inside an ice cream bucket. It took about an hour and a half for them to die.
It still gives me goose bumps to write this (shudder). The poop in the nest definitely did not come from a mouse, and we still don't know what it was. We might get to go through this all over again. I really hope that we really did scare away the bigger animal, and I really hope that there were no additional members of the mouse family that made it into our house.
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