And now, the long-awaited RAT story

I know you’ve all been on pins and needles waiting for the rat story. So here we go… About two weeks before Christmas, I was washing clothes and when I was rebooting the laundry, I noticed the washing machine had water under it that had not been there prior to the washing of the load of clothes. Using my superb detective skills, I deduced that the washing machine must have a leak. Not using my common sense, I decided to run it again to see if it really was leaking. Suffice it to say, yes. Yes, it was. I had SuperDad look at it because he’s the man and I was scared to lift the washer due to visions of me with a squished hand or worse. There were chewed holes in the drain hose, which was one of those plastic accordion-like hoses. (Side note: I spied a water bottle lid peeking out from under the china cabinet a couple of days before this episode and when I grabbed the lid and picked up the bottle, I sloshed water all over myself. Only after soaking my face and shirt did I notice that the whole side of the bottle had been chewed completely off. I know my children are destructive, but I highly doubted one of them was responsible. I was totally grossed out as I realized that a mouse - haha, we still thought it was a mouse - had chewed a hole to get to the water in that bottle and I had subsequently just doused my face with it. Okay, side note over… we now resume the story at hand).

SO, SuperDad made a trip to Home Depot right before Christmas and bought some steel-reinforced hose to replace the drain hose that had been molested by the rodent population. At this point, we were pretty sure we had a rat (haha, notice I said A rat, as in only one) by the size of the, ummm, sprinkles we had been finding at various points of the house. So we (and by “we,” I mean SuperDad) replaced the hose, wrapped it in aluminum foil, and got the washer all fixed. I washed clothes that we desperately needed to wear to all those Christmas celebrations. I also put in a white towel to soak in bleach water overnight. The next day, we had another leak. Bleach water on the floor. Aluminum foil pieces all over the place, mixed with very large, ummm, sprinkles. But we didn’t have time to mess with it, so we went, we celebrated, we came home late in the evening on Christmas Day. We have a bag of dog food sitting next to the back door and when we walked in, there was a very large mouse trying to hide. There was also a car battery (don’t ask) sitting next to the dog food bag. To spare you most of the grisly details, we smooshed the mouse behind the car battery. It was a big ‘un, but we didn’t think it was the one responsible for the bleach water leak, which SuperDad fixed a day or two later. This time, we pulled the whole washing machine out and I scrubbed the floor underneath after SuperDad fixed the leak. The rodent hadn’t actually chewed through the steel-reinforced hose like we thought at first (big sigh of relief, that would have scared me), but there was another hose with chew marks on it, but wasn’t leaking. We weren’t sure where the leak was coming from, but reseated all the seals and hoses and stuff and it was okay.

Anyway, for the next week or so, we kept an eye out for mouse-y activity. We saw some mice when we had friends over on New Year’s Eve, and while they were treated to the spectacle of me hunting mice with the BB gun (which I’m fairly sure was goofy and dorky and has provided them with many a laugh, even now), I never actually got any, despite baiting them with dog food. At one point, SuperDad dumped the couches over on their sides and we all tried to stomp the mouse as it ran out from underneath. (And when I say “we,” I mean the guys. I screamed and jumped like a scared little girl. I prefer a ranged attack over up-close melee, thank you very much.) The next night, after the kids (and I) had gone to bed, SuperDad set several traps in the laundry room and several more in the house. Before he came to bed, he heard a SNAP! He went to the laundry room to check, and lo and behold! There was a GIANT mouse-rat trying to make its face quit hurting. The trap hadn’t actually caught it, but it wounded it enough that it couldn’t see to run away. SuperDad brought out the BB gun and had to shoot the thing three times before it died, but not before making a big bloody mess in my laundry room. And then he came and woke me up so I could see it. Let me just say HOLY CRAP! That was the biggest mouse-rat I’ve ever seen. I wanted to take pictures of it, but I didn’t, but only because the batteries were low on my camera. It was disposed of and discussed at length. We’re not so sure it was actually a rat since it looked more like a mouse, only really, really big.

We thought the rodent ordeal was over. Boy, were we wrong. Over the next few nights, we set out trap after trap and caught little mouse after little mouse.

One day, late last week, while SuperDad was at work, Big Brother was at school, and the two little ones were napping, I heard a rustling in the dog food bag by the back door. I grabbed the BB gun, moved the bag and saw a very large rodent skitter under the laundry room door. It looked about the size of the biggest one SuperDad had killed. So I decided to wait it out. I knew it would be back for that dog food, so I set a sticky trap next to the bag and went about my business. A little while later, after Big Brother came home from school, I heard a noise coming from the area of the dog food. That big mouse-rat had gotten stuck on the trap and was trying to get loose. I shot it with my handy-dandy BB gun FIVE TIMES before it would quit twitching. One of those times, I put the gun directly on the mouse-rat’s back and the BB did not penetrate the skin! I decided to leave the mouse-rat on the trap so SuperDad could gauge the size since I thought it might be as big as the other big one we killed. SuperDad said it wasn’t as big, but almost. You’d better believe I took pictures of this one: (Click the pictures to see larger ones)

If you guessed that the story ends here, well, you would be wrong. What I did not photograph is the large mouse that got stuck on the same sticky trap later on that afternoon, before we had a chance to dispose of the big guy. The second one was big, but not as big as the one pictured above. It didn’t take as many BBs to kill it, but it skitzed out on us after the first shot and started frantically flailing around, trying to get away, and got blood all over the wall. Ick. Since that day, we’ve caught many a mouse in the traps we set out. We haven’t had any in a day or two, so I think we’ve got them under control. Well, as much as you can have control over a mouse-rat infestation when you live out in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by open pasture land.

So, the moral of the story is this: Sticky traps and a Red Rider BB gun are deadly weapons in the hands of a housewife. Beware, mouse-rats of the world! We’re armed and sick of you leaving your sprinkles all over the place.