Of Mice and Men...

     A couple of years ago we had planned a big summer vacation and someone went downstairs to the food storage to get something for the trip and knocked over a can of beans, and like any good child who knows how to hide messes from her parents, ... I hand-swept up most of them and put them back in the can, but gave up on the rest and pushed them under the shelves.  Yup.  Pretty slick.  Irresponsible?  You bet'cha.
     Fast-forward maybe a month.  When we get home (like 4 A.M.) and Dad goes down to the basement to put things away, what does he hear?
SQUEAK-SQUEAK-SQUEAK!
     He opens the door to the storage room, flicks on the lights and, quick as lightening, 20 little gray things disappear.  He was NOT happy.  We called the exterminator who set up some sticky-traps and it all seemed to go OK for maybe 2 months (we only caught two mice in the sticky traps) until we started finding 'remnants,' if you know what I mean, on EVERYTHING!!  We got pretty grossed out, and decided to take EVERYTHING out, bleach the kaboodles out of it, deep clean the room, etc., etc.
     We thought it might take a month, at most, to get the mess all cleaned up.  Oh, how naive and young we were.  
     I guess our estimation would have been correct, IF... our basement had not flooded, and IF we hadn't had a play production  at the same time, and  IF we didn't have the rest of life to keep us busy.  It ended up taking us over a year to clean up the storeroom.
     The Mice were... (cough) taken care of.  Fifty-two mice to be exact.
     And before you get squeamish at the thought of ever eating at our house, just know that we bleached and scrubbed every centimeter of that basement and everything in it.
     I guess it sorta was a blessing.  We finally went through our 'year's supply' of food storage and threw out all of the old stuff.  No joke, I found jars and cans from before even my OLDEST BROTHER WAS BORN.  I guess they just kept getting pushed to the back of the shelves.
     We bleached so much that the smell of bleach makes my stomach curdle, and you can bet I learned my lesson about cleaning up messes promptly.
     All in all, it wasn't really that bad.  I've found that our family really grows closer over these crises and we've had some pretty fun times, too.  But I don't EVER want to do THAT again!!!


 Love y'all!