STEWIE

Stewie was a mouse that moved into our trailer with us. The first time I met Stewie I was cleaning out a room in which I had been storing unpacked boxes and things that didn't have a better place to be. I startled Stewie and he jumped out from behind a box and went scurrying across the room to another pile of boxes where he sat staring at me and I stared at him and neither of us moved for what seemed like at least a minute...When he first jumped out at me I thought it was a cockroach because 1, yes cockroaches do get that big, and 2, if there is one bug that is worse than any other, it is a cockroach, so I immediately assumed the worse. Turns out it was just a furry little field mouse. So to make light of the situation (I'd never had mice in my house before) I named him Stewie and that's how I referred to him over the next week or so. Jared brought home some mouse traps, and we set them up. I heard him in our kitchen cupboards and in a few days I found him in there stuck on the trap and when he saw me (this was now the second time we made eye contact) he started struggling to get off. Well then I felt bad and decided it had been a bad idea to name him in the first place.

A little while after that, we had more mice. We put out more traps , but this one mouse kept evading the traps, I'd find them the next morning pushed to the side. I put sticky traps out everywhere he'd been running, and one night I heard him finally stuck to it so I was relieved and went back to sleep. Well the next morning he had chewed his way out of the trap! A few nights later( by now I was wired and tense every night, thinking that the mice were invading our house( I'm pretty sure one was in our bed once) and not sleeping. So when I heard him in the kitchen I got up so he couldn't chew his way out again, but he had already started and all that was still stuck to the trap was his tail. When I walked in the kitchen( more like sneaked, this was at around 3 in the morning and I felt much like a cat on the prowl), he saw me and froze. As soon as I reached out to grab the trap he started squeaking and flopping around the sink and he would have got free, so I quickly grabbed another sticky trap and tried to squish him in between the two traps and his little hands touched my finger....! I finally had him sandwiched in the traps and put him in the garbage, glad that this evasive mouse was finally gone.

After that I decided I wanted Enzo back in the house to keep the mice down (Enzo had been banished outside because he wanted to be out there all the time anyway, and he'd get ticks on him, and he was a little wild, and wasn't fixed). So I took him to the vet, had him fixed, took him home and gave him a BATH, and a bed and all that. Turns out Enzo is quite the hunter. I woke up in the middle of the night to hear him eating something – I thought it was trash – and when I got up to look he growled at me. He was devouring a mouse! It was very gross. My overly vivid imagination went wild after that, creating all kinds of scenes about mice. Jared plugged the holes where they were getting in, and we haven't had any problems after that.

But then Enzo decided not to use his litter box, that our living room was better, and so after all this drama with mice and getting him fixed and bathed so he could be inside with us and take care of the mice, he's been banished outside again to indulge in his wild nature.