Ewwww.

I was thinking of a few creative titles for this post:

The Mice is Right!
Mice Advice
A Mice Way to End the Year

...and "Ewwww" was the best one that I thought would really capture what my husband and I are enduring right now.

The real, hard cold has only hit us in the last week - that's right, the snow started falling after Christmas! - and as a result I think these little critters are looking for some solace in our kitchen. Thanks guys.

For any of you that know John and I, you are familiar with the fact that we are both almost unparalleled in our OCD cleaning tendencies. Not only are we neat freaks, we're clean freaks, and it's nice to have met my match in that category. As a result, we were a little more than shocked to find mice droppings um.. everywhere in our kitchen... on Christmas Eve, and spent 7 - 9 AM mass deep cleaning the kitchen before we started to prepare our Christmas feast (which went amazingly, by the way).

All utensils, all cooking supplies, - everything - got put into extremely large and ugly tote boxes which now replace what cupboards and drawers were supposed to before. Except for our food. We are new to this, and we for some reason thought our food cupboards were entirely invincible (they're not), so when we returned home from our massive 4-day-Christmas-family-extravaganza John not only found 2 mice caught in our clever little traps, but droppings all around our food. And some boxes and bags scratched open. Yuck.

So again, we've laid out more traps, and these little rodents are controlling our lives for the next few weeks. I pray they just all go away, but I have a feeling that's in our hands.

As a result, this post: how do we get rid of mice? I think we have more than just a little, casual, normal problem. In a 5 day span, our traps - in our kitchen only, nevermind the basement - have caught 4 mice.

And not any mice: deer mice. Carriers of Hantavirus, which is deadly. Yay. They have eyes that bug out, ears that pop up, and their bellies are distinctively white - seperated from their gray upper bodies.

Any thoughts on how we can make these disgusting, disease-ridden little creatures go away would be more than appreciated.

And in future, for those who visit in the month of January: we WILL be keeping all of our food, cutlery, pots, pans, everything, in tote boxes and transferring them slowly back into our drawers inside Tupperware containers for the remainder of our lives.