Year of the Rat

Happy Lunar New Year! By some strange quirk of fate, as we celebrate the year of the rat, our home has been honored with a visit from a four-legged, furry, little mouse. The first sighting was a couple of days ago when Jojo and my nieces, Maddie and Sydney, were in the kitchen and came face to face with the little guy. They scoured the kitchen with flashlights but could not find him after he darted away. A few days later, I was sitting in the family room watching tv when I saw him scurrying across the kitchen floor. We've started calling our little trespasser "Remy" after the mouse with great culinary talents in the Disney film Ratatouille. After all, we keep finding our "Remy" in the kitchen too.

Now, even if I am in no way a neat freak, I have a very healthy dislike for rodents living in the same house as I do. I keep picturing his furry little body climbing on top of all our things and it gives me the shivers. After Jojo first saw Remy, we headed to Home Depot to get some rat poison. Okay "poison" is too strong a word. We got some rat medicine. To be honest, we didn't really want Remy to die. We just wanted him to get disoriented and to go away. So we mixed up the medicine with peanut butter and left these packets strategically around the house. We had read that mice are extremely fond of peanut butter.

Apparently Remy is not like other mice and does not like peanut butter. We tried jelly. Still nothing. Every day I'd come home and find the peanut butter/jelly untouched. After yet another Remy-sighting, I called my mom to ask her advice and she said try fly paper. Once Remy walks across it, he'll get stuck and we can then bring him outside (or somewhere far, far away). I thought that was perfect. After all, I didn't want to get those mousetraps that snap shut and splatter rat guts all over the floor. Too cruel! So off to Home Depot we go to buy fly paper. We find out that Home Depot does not carry fly paper, so we settle for "mouse paper" mounted on plastic - which in concept is pretty much the same thing. I set the mouse paper traps around the house (in the corners where we have spotted Remy in the past) and entice him to get his furry paws stuck by leaving bits of cookie and fudge in the center of the paper.

After 3 days, still nothing! I purposely put one of the sheets right by the stove (where there is a slight gap between the stove and the drawers). This is where Jojo first saw Remy dart into so we think this may be how we gets in. The next day, the sticky paper was still empty but had been moved about an inch to one side. Jojo and I both swore that we didn't move the sheet which clearly had been tampered with! Remy had somehow pushed the paper aside (probably by the plastic lining). Not only that, but the piece of cookie I had used as bait looks a lot smaller too. We are dealing with an evil rodent genius!

We are not giving up on our peanut-butter-and-jelly-flavored-rat medicine nor our mouse-paper-baited-with-cookie-and-fudge traps, but we're being very careful too. No more food left on the counter, no more dishwasher and cabinet doors left open, and no more garbage bags left unsealed. Despite it being the year of the rat, we just can't wait to get rid of ours!