Interesting mouse fact: Baby mice are called pups with the average litter size being 10-12 (from Wikipedia).

Current Death Toll: 2
I will be updating the number of mice that perish in our house.  If anyone has a reasonable suggestion of how to dispose/rid the house of mice, I will try it out and report on the results. How good at pest control are all of you??

In that vane, here is how each of the two mice met their demise:
The first was 3 days ago.  This mouse fell victim to my first ever loaded/set mouse trap.  The trap was set out in the pantry where the mice had been into the dog food.  I of course did not dispose of the mouse but rather ran to my husband, Geoffrey, for assistance which he most graciously provided.   


The second was this morning.  This mouse met a very different fate.  Yesterday morning I woke to find the pantry mouse trap sprung with the cheese gone.  No mouse was anywhere to be seen.  This morning, I went to check the same trap and not only was the cheese gone, so was the trap.  Very strange.  I then happened to glance to my left and saw the trap partially wedged under the door leading to the laundry room.  Sticking out from the snapped trap/dangerous end was a mouse tail.  The whole thing was wiggling.  When I discovered this, so did our dog Honey.  She became very interested in this moving mouse trap and quickly decided this warranted close monitoring.  Once again, I did what I do best and when to ask Geoffrey for help (in case you haven't caught on, I am something of a chicken). After about 10 minutes, my husband dragged himself out of bed (the difficulties with getting my husband out of bed could be extensively explored in another blog) and he opened the laundry room door.  Sure enough, quite a large field mouse was attached to the trap by its tail.  When Geoffrey picked up the trap, Honey immediately bit the mouse.  Sadly for the mouse, this did not kill it but rather only added to its misery.  Geoffrey took the mouse outside and opened the trap.  At this point, Honey took a look at the mouse on the ground and ate it.

"Uh oh, something died."
As a woman who grew up in a very rural setting, I have had the opportunity to become very familiar with the strong odor associated with decomposition.  Anyone who lives or has lived among the wildlife has had the wonderful experience of walking into a house and saying, "Uh oh, something died."  One such moment happened approximately 20 years ago when I was still in high school.  

My mother, sister, and I walked into our kitchen one afternoon(the kitchen I now cook in on a daily basis) and were inundated with the wonderful smell of decomp.  If you have never smelled this, count your blessings/lucky stars/any other fortunate symbol because it is unpleasant to say the least - imagine what death might smell like and then add on rotten milk. The three of us tried to narrow down where the offending order was coming from and all of us zeroed in on the oven.  Great.  

My mother, being by far the bravest of us three, decided to start a closer investigation.  She looked in the cook top and inside the oven.  Luckily for our cooking needs, neither of these areas presented a dead body.  Next on the list was the broiler drawer under the oven.  Again, no dead bodies were present but when the drawer was opened, the smell became nauseating.  Definitely getting warmer (no pun intended).  We removed the drawer and looked under the oven.  Thwarted again it seemed but my mother decided to get a flashlight to be certain (good thinking since the smell was making our eyes water).  When my mother shined the flashlight under the oven, we finally discovered the origin of the decomp smell.  Way in the back of the oven, on the far left corner sat an electrical box.  This box was screwed shut on each side but the corners had small openings.  Out of one of these openings we saw a long skinny tail - a mouse had been electrocuted.  


The three of us looked at each other and thought, "What do we do now?"  Once again, my mother came up with the solution.  She went to a drawer and took out a pair of tongs.  Then she got a screw driver and undid one of the screws on the electrical box.  For those safety conscious of you out there, no we didn't think to turn off the electricity but since I am writing about mice and not the loss of a family member, no one but the mouse received an electrical shock.  Either my sister or I (can't remember after all of these years) used the screwdriver to widen the opening in the box, the other held the flashlight, and my mother pried a decomposing mouse out of our oven's electrical box.  Yes, there was fluid.  At this point, I stopped looking and have no more to report other than my mother did dispose of the mouse is some way outside. The decomposition smell had been found and dealt with.  Oh, the tongs?  I have no memory of what became of the tongs.  My sincerest hope is that my mother threw them out with the mouse but I really just don't know...