Mouse Hunt

Okay, don’t let this discourage you if you’re planning to visit us, but we have a mouse. He’s been around long enough that I’ve stopped panicking and acting like a girl when I see him now (the first time he showed himself, he ran under a chair in the family room and I refused to move until Chris came home from work an hour and a half later to chase him out.)

He’s a crafty little bugger and he and Chris are now locked in an epic battle for dominion of the house. Chris has been pursuing him like Captain Ahab for about a month, getting up at 2 in the morning to check mouse traps or just prowl about the house, hoping to catch the mouse unawares.

He first tried catching him with your standard mouse trap, where you put the bait on the trap and the mouse triggers the trap and it snaps on him. The day after he set it out, the bait was gone and the trap was still set. You could almost hear the mouse snickering and taunting Chris from his hide-out. So then we tried a glue trap. It’s a large sticky square that you place the bait on so that when the mouse comes to get the bait, he gets stuck on the sticky part and stays there until Chris comes to…er…take care of him.

I’m not making this part up. We came downstairs this morning to find that the mouse had gotten a paper towel out of the garbage, laid it over the sticky part of the trap, walked across the towel and eaten the bait. I swear. Chris, who is horribly allergic, has been reduced to muttering that we may get a cat.

It almost seems wrong to kill an animal smart enough to outwit us like that.

From the Mouths of Babes…

So we went up to a town in the mountains on Saturday to do some Christmas shopping and stuff and by the time we got around to looking for a place for lunch, it was already early afternoon and we were hungry. And you know how it is when you’re in a touristy town and looking for lunch — you expect to see a bistro or cafe or something at every corner and then…there are none. We couldn’t find a stinking thing for miles and miles. We drove around a lake and finally came to a place near the dam called (sigh…) The Dam Brewery. We went in and of course the menu was filled with jokes about The Dam Beer and The Dam Coffee and…you get the idea.  We ate and went on our merry way home, thinking no more of our trip until…

…Sunday morning when, as he was getting out of the van at church, Timothy said in his Outside Voice, “Mom, Dad really liked the beer at The Dam Brewery, didn’t he?”

So now everyone at church thinks we’re foul-mouthed alcoholics. Why, why, why did we encourage him to read????

A Snowy Day

Nothing like a walk in a snowstorm to show you the true state of your breath. It’s been snowing all day today but I needed some exercise so while Chris was still home, I bundled myself up to my eyebrows (which is why I could smell my breath — I need to change my toothpaste) and took a 20-minute walk to Blockbuster to rent a movie. The kids and I have Breakfast-for-Dinner-and-a-Movie-Night on Fri nights. We eat on the floor in front of the TV while we watch our movie. Tonight’s selection is “101 Dalmations” — the original Disney cartoon version.

It was a lovely walk — no one out except me and a few cars. I wiped out once on the way home — the problem isn’t today’s snow but it snowed Tues, melted a little, then froze and snowed again. So I was walking on a light dusting of snow over a sheet of ice. I slipped in front of someone’s driveway and went right down on my bum.

I went through the park on the way back and the pond is frozen except for a spot in the middle where all the ducks and geese are crowded and swimming. Man, that must be cold. For some reason, the geese migrating south stop here. I’m not sure if they don’t realize they could hold out for somewhere like California or Mexico or if they just get tired of flying…but they all hang out here for the winter. We see hundreds of them.

Our HOA sponsored a hayride last Saturday so Timothy and I went (it was snowing pretty hard so I left the smaller kids home with Chris’ mom. Alexis still has asthma problems when she plays in the cold…though it’s gotten so much better here than it was in LA, it’s amazing.) It’s a cool experience to ride in a haywagon through the streets I’m so used to driving down. And it was snowing and the neighbors were out and it was all Christmas-y and stuff. Love it! If we wanted, we could find a hayride somewhere around here probably every day from now until Christmas. People go a little nuts with them.

I’ve been trying to make it to a town about an hour from here (up in the mountains) because there’s a shop there that had some things I wanted to get people for Christmas presents. But every day I’ve been free to go, the weather has been so bad I don’t drive unless I have to. Especially on I-70, which is a main road through the mountains. It’s curvy and if one car crashes, it backs things up for hours and hours. Blech. So if you get your Christmas present late this year, I blame the weather.

Waaaaaah!

My baby’s growing up! I have to leave in a few minutes to check out a kindergarten class for Timothy. I’ve been worrying all morning about whether he’ll get a good teacher and whether the class will be challenging enough for my little genius and whether the class will be too challenging and whether the teacher will yell at him and whether the teacher will yell at me and whether it will properly prepare him for an Ivy League school and med school and life as a neurologist. Did our parents stress this much? We all turned out fine. Right? Right?

We went to AZ over Thanksgiving to meet up with Chris’s family and ride the “Polar Express” train. The kids loved it — the train left after dark and the kids (and some adults — Kari!) wore their jammies and we all had hot chocolate and cookies and they read the book “The Polar Express” on the train and we all sang Christmas carols. The train stopped in an area with lights that the conductor informed everyone was the North Pole, and Santa boarded the train and gave each kid a silver bell (read the book). Timothy whispered to me, looking a little concerned, “Mom, I don’t think that’s really the North Pole,” and when I told him no, we were just pretending, he looked worried and said, “Well…then that might not really be Santa.” He kept eyeing me and Chris after that, like he was  trying to figure out what else we were trying to pull.

Chris’s mom is staying with us for a week. When we go for coffee or dinner or something, she keeps giving us money…I feel like I’m 12 and getting an allowance again. But it’s great. After taking care of three kids, a dog, and occasionally a full-grown man, it’s nice to be taken care of once in a while.

I realized looking back on my blogs that they’re mostly about the kids. I promise I have a full life, including time with other actual grown-ups. I’m in a pretty intense Bible study on Tues mornings (CBS, for those of you who’ve heard of it). The most memorable story we’ve read recently involved Elisha cursing some teenagers for calling him bald, so God sent bears out of the nearby woods to maul and eat them. And as those of you who know me well can attest, that’s my biggest somewhat irrational fear — being eaten by a bear. I suppose the lesson there is to watch what you say while walking through the forest. No?

I’m also in a book club with some women in the neighborhood. I have to leave early so I usually am only there for the gossip and the food, but really that’s the best part anyway. I didn’t even read the first two books we did (I did read the one for this month, thank you very much. “Skipping Christmas” — the ending was good but I spent the whole middle of the book wanting to give every character a sound spanking. Which means even when I’m involved in activities without kids, my inner mom keeps butting her nose in, I guess.)

My favorite all-time Christmas story, however, is still the one I read when I was like nine years old — I highly recommend a re-read if you have it — “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.” Now that I’m old and hormonal, it makes me cry every year, but I love it so much. Everyone should read it.