What an exciting day we had here today! It started out slowly. Mike needed to be two hours away for church this morning, which gave me, unfortunately, an excuse to stay home this morning. But I enjoyed my coffee on our cracked patio while watching the big three play in the yard, and I enjoyed reading to the girls, finishing up The Trumpet of the Swan, while the boys napped in the early afternoon. It was a lazy, idyllic sort of day.
Manly Mouse is trying his hardest to nap in his bassinet these days. Usually he can do about 30-45 minutes at a shot during the day, but if I can get him in there without nursing, with just snuggles and shushing and singing and rocking, then I figure that's a success. It's such fun to see him wake up smiling and cooing, which he doesn't do as readily if he's eaten himself to sleep. Shorter naps from him does make it seem like I'm constantly putting him down for a nap, but if he naps, even for those short periods, in his crib, then it does give me two free hands to attend to the other kiddos. This is a good thing. So is holding a sleeping, sweet, toothless little fellow. Win, win, either way, I guess.
Anyway, my point was that Manly was napping in his crib late this afternoon, so I decided to put the other three out in the yard, turn on the sprinkler, and have some fun watching them get soaking wet while doing some much-needed garden-weeding myself. By the time I got all three herded into swimming suits and sunscreened and got the sprinkler turned on, I figured I had already used up half of Manly's naptime, but still, it was sort of exciting to put on my gardening gloves and head out to the garden.
It was going along splendidly. The weeds, though taller than I am, were pulling out beautifully, and I was pumped to see that some of our turnips really did come up! Along I went, pulling, pulling, pulling, until I noticed some fuzz in the soil. Well, I thought, that looks like Jola (pronounced Joe-lah) the rabbit has been laying in our garden. She's our "pet" wild rabbit that we watch in the yard. Mighty thinks she's a cat and meows at the door whenever he sees her. Strange, thought I, that a rabbit would stay in the garden long enough to lose that amount of hair.
All these thoughts ran through my mind in quick succession and I brushed my fingers against the furry spot.....and suddenly jolted away with a screech when I saw tiny little moving creatures in what I immediately identified as a mouse nest!!!!
Goodness. What a fright. What a startle.
The girls were overjoyed, of course. Little furry creatures with twitching ears? Babies? Um, yeah, right up these girls' alley. Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh dear. We have a mouse nest full of little baby mice in the middle of our jungle of a garden.
Impressively I never did start to shake. Got a bit dizzy as the shock wore off. Thanked God that I had my gardening gloves on. But no shaking.
To my Mom's and sister's (and maybe everyone else who is reading this's) dismay, the girls and I decided to really hope Mike would not insist on killing the family of mice. The girls kept going over to the garden to check on them. Mighty went over periodically and said, "Ohhhhhh", though I'm pretty sure he didn't see the little family given that they were still fairly camoflauged. Miss Mouse tried valiantly to take a picture of the mouse family, but all she kept getting was the furry nest. I, um, chose not to go back over to look at the squirmy little things.
For some reason, though, as disgusted as I was to have nearly grabbed a handful of mice, their little wriggling bodies all cuddled together and covered with their mama's fur made me smile. And it hurt my stomach to think of Mike killing them. After all, if I'd have kept the garden weeded, little Mouse Mama probably wouldn't have thought it looked like an abandoned jungle, perfect in which to raise her brood. Plus, the girls love all things gross like that - currently we are owners of an ant farm, a wormery (which I somehow end up watering every now and then because I happen to love worms as much as Sunny does!), a jar with a caterpillar and a chrysalis, and, now, a garden-mouse-nest. I'd have laughed if someone had painted my life before my eyes like this in high school. Laughed.
However, even back then I'd have cried about a mouse losing her life protecting her babies. Sheesh. It's only been in recent years I've been able to handle driving by road kill.
Anyway, back to our afternoon. I texted Mike something along the lines of "I have a story for you!!", so he came in the door ready for an earful. I described the incident to him, resulting in more than a few chuckles on his part as he imagined the scene in his mind. Then I asked if he would consider not terminating the mouse family. Well, that gained me quite a look and the response of, "They're outside. Why would I kill them?". We decided to leave the mouse tenants in the garden alone, though I'm not sure whether or not Miss Mouse and Sunny will now be able to donate their produce from that garden to the food bank.....I thought of ways to sterilize the produce, but it didn't seem any safer or friendlier to give bleach-washed-produce to hungry people than to give them food mice had trounced all over.....
So, for now, the mice stay where they are. I explained to the girls that if they stay outside, they are our friends, and they can stay. Just like the ants we spent several weeks learning about. If they stay outside, we can be happy to see them (at least the kind we have up here). But if they come inside, I will melt their exoskeletons with essential oil/alcohol spray faster than they can take a breath. And I won't feel bad about it. Not one bit. Same goes for mice. If they stay in the yard, they're welcome. If they venture into our garage, vehicles, or house, that means war. My fingers are crossed that the three random cats we have patrolling our yard will also help with this endeavour. Honestly, I think that there are probably mice all over the city, and we just don't often run across their abodes. These particular nesting rodents cannot be the first to have summered in our yard. Thankfully we haven't had a mouse problem even so. I am prepared to take public blame if we suddenly have an influx of rodents this winter.
Interestingly, I asked Mike tonight what he'd have done if I had begged him to go terminate them as soon as he got home. He smiled and said, "I'd have handed you a hammer and told you to do it yourself if it was that important.". So, apparently, my great hunter has his limits. The two bears on our walls in the basement, and the several more that have been in our freezers, the rattlesnake that is still frozen out in the garage freezer, and the countless (no, not countless - he has a running tab) four legged creatures that we've eaten are purposeful hunts. Apparently killing rodent families isn't so much in his recreational ideal. I told him I loved him so much more for it.
And then Manly made the biggest burping sound he's ever made, and Mike told me I had disgusted my son with my mushy-romantic talk.
Incidentally, my grandpa, Papa, told of having seen a mama shrew carrying her babies frantically ahead of his tractor as he was plowing a field. He recalled thinking how easily he could have just kept going and run right over her, but he chose instead to slow the tractor and let her get out of that particular row before continuing on. He said he just couldn't run over a mama trying to save her babies.
Similarly, my own Dad had a raccoon problem in a barn last year. Mama raccoon had gotten into the attic of the barn and had a litter (litter?) of raccoon babies. Dad knew where he could block the mama from getting back to her babies. It would have been easy to do - babies would have starved to death, exterminating a potential problem. A dangerous potential problem, really. But Dad couldn't - wouldn't - do it. He let the mama raccoon come and go and raise her little ones. I have a feeling I know how the story ends and that it did not end well for the raccoon family, but it ended a whole lot more sportingly than letting baby animals of any kind starve to death in the attic of a barn.
So now, tonight, Mike made a choice that his daughters will tell their children about - the time when Mom found the mouse nest in the garden, and Dad refused to kill the mice. Hopefully the story doesn't end in Mom and kiddos moving out of the house for a period of time in November so that Daddy could get rid of the mouse infestation then. But, I'm proud tonight and so much more in love than fourteen years ago when I *thought* I was really in love.
**I did check on the mouse nest tonight, and Mama Mouse has moved some of the fur I accidentally scraped off back on top of her nest. The mice are not visible, but you can see the fur covering moving in and out in the rhythm of their breathing.
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