If You Give a Mouse a cookie...or a gingerbread house...

So, October is quickly approaching and it makes me think of our first Halloween married. We made this awesome gingerbread house...and after a few days Brian asked me if I had been taking pieces out of it. "Um, no." I said. We noticed that all around it there were nibble marks. We lived in the oldest duplex in Provo (no joke, it really was the first built in 1921) and we joked around that it might be a mouse.




Then while I was at work one day Brian told me that he ended up seeing a cute little brown mouse running across the floor. I was going to school still and working so he was home during the day after he worked so he told me that he kept seeing this mouse...and I began to believe that he thought he saw a mouse, cuz I never saw it. But somehow more and more of our ginger bread house was missing...

Then one night Brian and I were talking on our bed and suddenly he jumped up ran into the bathroom, slammed the door, and after 10 maybe 15 min of banging and throwing stuff around, Brian came out of the bathroom with a victorious grin and cute brown mouse in a box. We threw it into a hurricane vase and drove it up the mountain to release it in the wild.

.....then....

I noticed that a bag of chocolates I had on the couch had a few half eaten pieces inside.... I asked Brian if he had eaten some of the chocolates and then returned them to the bag and he said no. The next morning I found this guy chilling outside my bedroom door.

So to sum it all up, we became really good at catching mice with cardboard boxes. Brian would be on one wall, myself on the other with a box and he would scare them toward me and they'd run inside the box. Before they knew it they were headed for the wild. We also incorporated a few sticky traps with chocolate bait and some good old fashioned mouse traps.

This one got a little messy...

That pile behind this guy isn't chocolate folks...

This guy was cute....

This one we named Mr. Shivers cuz we had to let him go in the snow.

So as Halloween approaches and you consider how to celebrate the holiday, think twice before you put together a gingerbread house... because if you give a mouse some gingerbread, he's going to invite the whole family over.