And more progress...

Before

And in progress...

Mice Tales, continued

A few of you may remember the story of a continuing thread of my marriage, the story of How Mice Are Taken Care Of. You may remember how very grateful I am that my husband is perfectly willing to very promptly remove any mice from our dwelling, usually at the expense of the mouse's life, but how I also wish he might use more conventional means, like, say, a mousetrap. Instead, Whatever Is Handy is grabbed when the mouse is cornered, and that then-bloody appliance/utensil/storage container gets thrown out because I can't stand the thought of using it again.

Well, he's acheived a personal best, and I don't even get a new appliance out of it. This week, work was finally set in motion on the November-kitchen-flood-fix, beginning with a section of new cabinet bases. When the installer pulled out my oven from the wall first thing in the morning, I quickly inspected to see how much of a cleaning disaster it was. I saw something on the wall and my morning-brain just couldn't quite process it. I called Levi over. "Levi," I said. "Is that a dead mouse flattened against the kitchen wall?"

"Whoa," Levi said. "It is."

A near-petrified, perfectly flat mouse, long tail and all, stuck to the wall behind my stove. And then I remembered, sometime last year (I think?) when Eric has chased a mouse around the kitchen and when it had run on the countertop and -- you guessed it -- behind the stove he -BAM- slammed my oven back against the wall.

Well, now we know, he got it.

In which you see I am a slavedriver

Me (dumping a new pile onto the bed): "Come and fold, Delaney."

Delaney (coming in to fold): "I knew you were going to say that."

Me: "Wow. How do you know such things?"

Delaney: "Because, whenever you see a pile of laundry and then you see me, you say, 'Come and fold'."

Just keeping you informed...

Since the corn is down around our house, the mice have come a'runnin. Into our home. To be warm, presumably, although then why aren't they camping out in Eric's office where it's warm and toasty from the corn boiler instead of in my pantry and kitchen? Oh, yeah -- the food.

Tally so far: they've eaten on two bags of chocolate chips, one loaf of bread, and a bag of quick oats. I haven't lost any more household items to their destruction because we haven't been able to destroy any (yet!). Eric devised a brand-new capture-and-kill system (built a better mousetrap : ), which the mice are apparently discussing (in my pantry), and then sharing the news with their friends. I'm sure they'll be lured in soon. In the meantime, we just went and bought 8 new old-fashioned mousetraps, set one, and watched the kitchen mouse run past it in a nice arc.

I promise to move on to fun kid posts with cute pictures in the near future. Maybe. : )

My post-holidays Holiday

This is exactly what I needed this week. We're not hitting our regular routine again until Monday, so I've been methodically cleaning each room, purging and organizing as I go. I have five willing participants who like the cleanliness and new arrangements, but only one of them is showing the true organizational gene so far. "What can we sort now, mom?", Delaney asks first thing in the morning. "Can I stop playing and help you organize?" That's my girl.

Some results of my therapy...

...a clean and sorted school area:

...a place for every single winter glove, hat and scarf, finally:

...and a to-the-corners, inside-the-cabinets, even-the-top-of-the-refrigerator clean kitchen:

So, if you're thinking about visiting us in 2008, tomorrow would be the day to do it. Everything may not be this clean again for another year. And now, when we are in the midst of the messiness of real life this year, I can pull up this post, inhale deeply, and remember.