Family of 8 times 2

**CAUTION: This post may be disturbing to some readers. Proceed with caution!

December 18th, 2010
The Saturday before Christmas I told the kids that they really needed to clean up the sewing/toy room or Santa was not going to be bringing any presents this year. It had been a long time since the room had really been cleaned so it was a disaster. While the kids were cleaning, I was taking the kids out one at a time to shop for their secret sibling gift. I started with taking Blondie before lunch because she had been extra helpful that morning and had even shoveled the driveway without being asked.After we returned from some stores, we ate lunch and then I took M&M to the store. As we were leaving the store to come home I got a call on my cell phone from home (which I of course didn't hear ring). So I quickly called back home when I noticed I had missed the call and Luke told me that while they were cleaning the toy room he and Blondie saw a mouse run across the floor along the wall! They quickly went to tell their dad and he found some mouse droppings along the floor over there as well as along the window sill in that room. He tried to find the mouse but the kids didn't stick around to watch it after they saw it so he didn't know where it had run to. When I got home a few minutes later DH had the kids removing everything from the room and piling it up in the family room while he searched for more mouse signs and possibly where it came from. He ended up finding some signs in the bathroom off the laundry room and then he found some in the utility/storage room downstairs. I bought some traps later that night and as of last week we have managed to get rid of eight mice!! (So apparently we have been housing twice as many in our home than we thought.) :P We think they have been living under the stairs off of the storage room. All of the mice that we caught were caught in the storage room near those stairs. It has been almost a week now since we caught the last one so we are hopeful that that is it.

Now we just wish we knew how they got into the house so we can prevent it from happening again! Apparently there are mice in homes all throughout the neighborhood so we are definitely not alone. A couple of years after we moved in some people in the neighborhood were talking about mice in their homes and asked me if we had any - which we didn't (or at least didn't know about). Our neighborhood is surrounded by open fields and a gully so the field mice are definitely all around us. I have seen them before in our vegetable garden, but it is a totally different thing to have them in your house!! The first night after the kids saw the mouse in the toy room I got up to feed MJ in the middle of the night and I kept hearing little noises throughout the house, wondering if it was a mouse I heard scurrying around! Luckily we have seen no signs anywhere else in the house and since we cleaned up the toy room that first day, we haven't seen any more signs of them in that room either.