Change of plans

This is what I planned to do today:

1.  Help Bailey pack for Trek (she leaves early tomorrow morning).

2.  Clean up the breakfast dishes, straighten the house, and do some laundry.

3.  Pay attention to Joseph and make sure his brain is still working - read to him, do workbooks together, etc.  Too much TV and video games over the last busy week may have caused irreparable damage

4.  Run errands.

5. Work in the yard.

6.  Maybe even re-read the rest of the 7th Harry Potter book before I see the movie sometime soon.


This was my reality today:

1.  Help Bailey pack for Trek.

2.  Clean up the kitchen after breakfast and . . . . . WHAT??????

3.  Discover mouse droppings on the floor in the pantry.

4.  Spend over 4 hours taking everything out of the big pantry (it is really deep and runs back under the stairs), clean up LOTS of DISGUSTING mouse poop, sanitize every surface in the pantry with bleach water and Lysol, throw away bag after bag of food which was open in the pantry.

And that's about it. My plans for the day went out the window with the discovery of our unwanted rodent visitors. Instead of doing brain boosting activities with his mother, Joseph watched hour after hour of Magic School Bus and Arthur and played plenty of Wii games.  After our mouse episode last year, I thought I had paid my dues. Apparently not. Click here for the story.

Good thing I have had lots of years of being the mother and cleaning up gross things.  It's a necessary talent.  I am so disgusted by the thought of rodents in my house and I'm feeling like a domestic failure for somehow attracting the creatures again.

The exterminator is scheduled to come on Saturday.  I had Dan set traps for the mice in my incredibly clean pantry and kitchen tonight.  He will have to be the one to check the traps in the morning.  I absolutely draw the line at removing dead or dying animals from the premises.

Disgusting.

**Update the next morning**  One mouse successfully caught and killed.  More to go?