A while back, She Who Does Not Obey got a snow day but I did not. The school board gets very trigger-happy sometimes, closing the schools at the least suggestion of bad weather. My work is less easily panicked, unfortunately.
I usually go with taking her to my work's daycare which is open as long as work's open, but this time I decided to see what her two friends down the street were up to. To SWDNO's delight, friends' mom was more than willing to take her on as there was already one other girl from up the street coming by and even numbers are always better in those situation.
Normally getting SWDNO out of the house on such a day is like trying to pry a lid off a reluctant pickle jar, but this was the perfect carrot. She is always ready to run down the street whenever the chance arises.
After I told her the good news, we were both hurrying to get ready for a change when the phone rang and friend's mom spoke to Her Father, asking if we might have a bit of peanut butter we could spare. It seems they had gotten themselves an unwanted boarder and needed to serve an eviction notice.
SWDNO was overjoyed with the notion of a mouse in the house and tickled at the idea of peanut butter being a mouse's favourite food.
Until it suddenly occurred to her that the peanut butter was going to be used lure the mouse to his doom. It was ammunition for a weapon of mouse destruction!
All of sudden, her moral campass kicked in and she became a conscientious objector - a conscientious objector who decided to hide in her bed and refused to put any more clothes on.
I did my best to rationalize the mouse's death sentence with tales of mouse poop and general untidiness, but could make no headway, all while the clock ticked away inexorably toward 9 a.m. Why couldn't they just trap the mouse? she asked and I could think of no other reason than that people usually went for the cheapest and easiest method of mouse disposal, a philosophical position that she would hardly find defensible in her current state of mind.
Fortunately for me, she hit upon a scheme which many had tried before her - she would just have to build a better mousetrap. She hunted around (clock still ticking!) until she found a shoe box and after some consideration, she demonstrated some methods by which she would lie in wait for the mouse with peanut butter on the lid, and then quickly slam the box down, trapping him as easy as can be.
I quickly agreed that this was an excellent plan -what with mice being so slow and easily fooled -and hustled her out the door.
As it happened, all the trouble was for naught - friends' mom was going to use a humane trap after all. Mickey would be caught and released into the wild to continue his unsanitary marauding somewhere else (or make his way back to their hospitable home once again).
I should have known friend's mom would have planned to use such a trap. One time, she made a foolhardy comment about actually liking our unruly dogs and being quite willing to adopt them should the need ever arise. Lucky for her, Her Father wasn't there to immediately take her up on such a unwise offer.
As for the mouse, he managed to elude capture on that day, despite the ingenious deployment of shoe boxes and other trapping devices. His fate is still a mystery to me.
But if he ever makes his way up to this end of the street, I have a feeling we will soon be the proud owners a yet another pesky pet.
