When Benchley the cat joined our household, we soon realized he was a good mouser. He brings us birds, moles, mice—and it is a little sad that we don’t appreciate him more for it. He would have made someone SUCH a good barn cat. We’ve discussed how we didn’t want to hurt his feelings by rebuking him in any way when he thinks he is being SO good—but that on the other hand we wished he would, er, STOP.

That was before we realized the mice were COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE. Well, or else Benchley brought some in and didn’t sufficiently kill them, and THAT is the reason we now have a thriving mouse metropolis. But if they were here already and he’s been doing his little cat job by killing them for us, that changes my whole point of view on the issue.

I first noticed mouse droppings and little tufts of mouse fur in the oven drawer. Then in the laundry room, on the windowsill over the washer and dryer. Then I went to get a bag of chocolate chips from the shelves in the basement, and it had been gnawed open, and fully a third of the bag was gone, and I was PRETTY SURE I would have used scissors if it had been me.

So. Getting rid of the mice. The thing is, I know there are various virus/germ/dirt/wiring/takeover reasons that mice should not be living in our house, but mice don’t horrify me OF THEMSELVES (though you can bet I’d be screaming and leaping back if one SKITTERED OUT when I didn’t expect it). I would, in fact, like to have mice as pets, for our next Household Pet Acquisition. So I briefly looked into the idea of capturing some of the mice we apparently ALREADY HAD, and putting them in a cage—but as you may have instantly intuited, this is not a good idea. Wild mice are not the same as mice that have been bred to the cage life.

I started with this 12-pack of Mice Cube no-kill mouse traps. I could just return the mice to the outdoors! We have several wild areas of the yard where they could live peacefully! This plan would be a total fail, of course, if there was an undiscovered place where the mice were coming into our house (I’m picturing a Family-Circle-style cartoon where Swistle is lovingly freeing a series of mice into the yard, each of which follows a dotted path right back into the house), but would work pretty well if our mouse population was the result of Benchley sparing the lives of two captured mice who subsequently found love in the oven drawer.

I put out just three traps to start with: one in the oven drawer, one in a gap under the cupboards the cats have been keeping a very close eye on, and one in the laundry room. The next day, the bait was missing from a trap, but no mouse was in the trap. Another trap, the one from the laundry room, had been tipped off the windowsill, and contained neither mouse nor bait. The third trap had a mouse in it. A terrified, quivering, ADORABLE SOFT LITTLE mouse.

I prepared to release it into the wild, and this is where I ran into the part of my plan I should have thought of already: it is WINTER outside. There is SNOW on the ground. Tossing a mouse into that snow would be the same as killing it with a mouse trap, except it would take longer and the mouse would suffer more and we’d end up with a carcass in the yard—or possibly a carcass brought back into the house by a cat.

I took the mouse back inside to think further about this. And the result of all that thinking was, I gently turned the trap upside down (which allows the door to open), and I put it back in the oven drawer, and I closed the oven drawer. My thought process was this: I have not ADDED anything to our mouse population; I have merely canceled one poorly-thought-out transaction and given myself time to think things through with the new information about what season it is right now.

The problem was, I still didn’t really want to kill the mice. And yet, they are eating our pantry supplies and/or possibly spreading disease, and that can’t be allowed to continue. And yet, it is going to be winter for quite some time.

So. My second purchase was of the Victor M2524 electric mouse trap. It kills the mice with a quick electric shock. It claims to meet “International Humane Kill” standards, which was comforting even though I’ve never heard of such a thing and have no idea what those standards are. For all I know, the standards are “Anything it takes to get rid of the little suckers HAR HAR HAR!” But it SOUNDS good: electric shock is one of the two ways we execute PEOPLE, and I couldn’t find little mouse-sized lethal-injection needles. More important to me is that it doesn’t use poison and it doesn’t snap.

I set the trap before bed, and in the morning the green light was blinking—meaning it had caught a mouse. I removed the mouse and re-set the trap. In the evening I checked the trap again, and the light was blinking again. I removed the mouse and re-set the trap. This morning I checked the trap again, and the light was blinking again. I removed the mouse and re-set the trap—and ordered a second trap so I can put one in a second location.

The trap is EXPENSIVE ($20) and the reviews are mixed, and if you try one I highly recommend reading the very helpful review by CF, which has a lot of troubleshooting stuff. It’s not that it’s a complicated trap (you put batteries in, you put a smudge of peanut butter in, you flip the switch on), but there are a few things it would be easy to do wrong (like putting in too large a portion of peanut butter) that the instructions don’t give you any idea about.

In short: I like both kinds of traps, but I’ll use the no-kill traps when it’s nice outside, and the electric shock one when it’s not—or if the mice keep coming back in.

Paul and I are planning to move, by which I mean not HOUSE (when we moved into this house we said with relief, “Now we can stay here and NEVER MOVE AGAIN”) but IN-HOUSE. What we want to do is this:

1. Move Elizabeth’s downstairs bedroom upstairs, to what is currently the computer room and office.

2. Move the office stuff and computers to what is currently our room.

3. Move our room to Will and Henry’s room.

4. Move Will and Henry’s room to Elizabeth’s room.

Does all this make you feel tired and headachey? Are you twitching and placing an order for two pounds of See’s? Good, then we are on the same page.

One of the great things about our house is that it is VERY FLEXIBLE. It was originally a 3-bedroom-1-bathroom raised ranch with an unfinished basement, but my dad added two bedrooms, a family room, and a bathroom downstairs. So now bedroomly-speaking (and remembering that one of them needs to be an office) we have one large bedroom, one medium bedroom, and three small bedrooms. This is EXCELLENT, especially if we were Sims who could go “Click! Bed is in this room now. Click! Change wall color. Click! Move dresser.”

Which we aren’t. And so I am exhausted just contemplating all the work that must take place between Point A (small bedrooms are Rob/Edward’s, Elizabeth’s, and office; medium bedroom is ours; large bedroom is Will/Henry’s) and Point B (small bedrooms are Rob/Edward’s, Will/Henry’s, Elizabeth’s; medium bedroom is office; large bedroom is ours).

Plus, we want to paint. OH LORD WHERE ART THOU??

We are taking it small at first. Paul said last night, “The first two tasks are to clean out behind the recliners in the living room, so we can put our bureaus there to make space in our room for when we’re ready to move the computers. And to clean off our bureaus, so we can move them to behind the recliners.” So we did. But oh dear, that is only the very tiniest tip of the iceberg. Because once we start this process for real, it will be a dizzying and exhausting series of moving and cleaning and PAINTING OMG I HATE PAINTING.

I do kind of enjoy choosing paint colors, though, if I can keep from getting into a Fret Loop about it. The first room to paint is the office/computer room. What color, do you think? Our computer desks (which we would like to replace, but it won’t happen soon) are pale wood and brushed silver. We’ll also be adding one or two homework desks (not the kind made to hold a computer, but the old kind with a little drawer over the knees for pens and rulers, and then three drawers down one side), and my plan is to get them from consignment shops, so they’ll be wood, probably maple (the slightly orange kind, not the pale kind) or else dark pine.

This tip has saved me so many times: When you take something off a hot burner, immediately cover the burner with a teakettle. Not only does this make it less likely that something else (dish towel, child’s hand) will carelessly touch the burner, but if you accidentally left the burner ON, the whistle of the kettle will alert you. Once I even took the whistling kettle off the burner, shaking my head at my dimminess, refilled the kettle, put it back on the hot burner, and it boiled and whistled AGAIN. …No, I didn’t. That was a lie to make the story better. But still, it is a GREAT TIP. I don’t know where I first heard it—it’s one of those tips that seems to go around and around.

********

Mouse (the cat) has peed on our bed three mornings in a row now. I am not kidding when I say it takes me ALL DAY to process the bedding, from the first rinse-and-then-vinegar-soak-and-then-vigorous-wash-cycle load in the morning until I take the last blanket out of the dryer as we’re getting ready for bed. So to wake up and find that it needs to be started all over again is…uh.

This experience has re-emphasized to me the awesomeness of Doing My Best’s Crappy Day Presents idea. This morning, waking up to the cat making skritchy “covering” noises, I could barely make myself get up (line of thought: “Well, she peed on PAUL’S side, so it’s safe to sink into a debilitating depression on MY side”)—but as I was heading for the shower I thought, “I will open a present!” Well, I didn’t have the exclamation point on there yet: it was more like “I will open a present.” I thought of it the whole time I showered, and as I made coffee, and as I stuffed the comforter into the washing machine for its third trip in three days.

Normally when the ingredients of a crappy day have assembled themselves, the odds of a friend HAPPENING to send me a package on THAT VERY DAY are so slim (though it HAS happened to me before, and did I ever tell you about the time Black Sheeped and I coincidentally sent each other care packages which ARRIVED ON THE SAME DAY?)—but having a present ALREADY ON HAND means the coincidence can be forced!

This morning I opened a present marked “moderate,” but I feel confident you will agree with me that FOUR HANDMADE HATS is in no way “moderate.” (Which was a happy coincidence, because I think I was under-choosing by choosing moderate anyway.) She made matching hats for me, Elizabeth, Niestle, and my sister-in-law! My picture doesn’t do a good job of showing the pretty wavy trim.

(Note the shorter haircut Elizabeth requested.
I’d never cut it so short before and was very nervous.)
(Luckily I didn’t end up needing to shave it and start over.)

I’ll show you too the gift I opened several days ago. This one was marked “minor,” but I think maybe Rachel is better at choosing presents than she thinks:

A reusable See’s Candies bag!! I will use this CONSTANTLY.

Some of these trendy diets, I’d like to try them just AS trendy diets, without having to pick through (or WADE through AMIRITE) all the “No one has known anything at all about nutrition until THIS EXACT MOMENT IN TIME!! Everything you heard before was LIES and IGNORANCE!! Finally the diet secrets of the universe have been UNLOCKED!! Previous so-called unlockings of diet secrets now reveal themselves to have been the prattling of infants!! THIS one 100% makes sense, unlike the others which were stupid and made crazy assumptions and eliminated or glorified foods by the method of a diet-book author rolling a fistful of dice!! Just because we’ve done a total 180 on all these foods again and again doesn’t mean you should question whether we’ll do so again in the future because we NEVER WILL!!”—just to get to the RULES.

I think what I want is dieting Cliffs Notes—like, “HO-kay, people, you know how this goes: yadda-yadda-now-we-know-everything, here’s the fun story behind it, and here are the allowed and non-allowed foods this time. Now let’s get out there and HAVE FUN!,” without the “Prostrate yourself at this dieting temple!! Then rise, and go out, and spread the One True Word to everyone you know!! And stop calling us a trendy diet, dammit!!”

[Edit: I’ve found what I’m looking for: I can look up the diets on Wikipedia! I get the story and the rules, PLUS I get the arguments for and against. More information, less hype and zealotry. Beauty.]

Math problem: If there are 18 kinds of See’s candies I wish to try, and I am willing to buy up to 2 pounds of custom mix in order to try them all, and if I can try up to 10 kinds per custom-mix pound, and if the least I can try per kind is 5% of a pound box, and if I have totally varying predictions on how much I’ll like each of the 18 kinds—how should I arrange the two boxes?

May I put a dilemma before you and collect your advice? The trouble with such things is that unless all of you agree (AHA HA HA HA HA *wipes eyes*), I will be TAKING some people’s advice and FLYING IN THE FACE OF other people’s advice—and the latter will seem ESPECIALLY ungrateful since I specifically ASKED. Well, this is the trouble with group friendships, I suppose.

Here is the trouble, and it requires a bit of boring background information but I will try to make it quick. In our school system, optional school music lessons start in 4th grade. We were kind of whatevs/meh about this milestone, since Paul and I between us have not quite enough musical talent to play an oatmeal canister, but two years ago when Rob was a fourth grader he was Very! Enthusiastic! and perhaps you remember the decision about which instrument he should choose, a post that generated almost as much controversy and emotion as posts on weight and Walmart, and then the follow-up where I answered some questions from the first post (sample question: “Flutes are for sissies”) and mentioned that Rob had decided on a clarinet.

I’m sorry, this is NOT ending up “quick,” is it. I am HURRYING, but hurrying is not WORKING.

Anyway, Rob took the clarinet, and to our surprise, listening to him practice was not the torment we’d expected—because, also to our surprise, he had some talent for it. We had visions of college scholarships. But despite being good at it, he didn’t enjoy it, and so we let him complete the deal: i.e., stick with it for the full school year but then be done. Then I spent about a hundred times more energy fretting about letting him be done than I’d spent on letting him take an instrument to begin with, and I’m still hoping he’ll choose to go back to it in high school.

ALL RIGHT, that is the back story. And now William is in fourth grade, and at the beginning of the year we just sort of yawned him through the same path Rob had taken. William is a different personality type than Rob, so instead of a relentless series of conversations about Every! Possible! Aspect!, it was more like:

Me: Hey, do you want to take an instrument?
William: Um….yeah. Sure.
Me: Which one?
William: Um….maybe clarinet or flute or trumpet.
Me: Let’s look at YouTube videos of those and you can pick one.
William: Okay.
[we watch videos]
William: Clarinet.
Me: Okay.

Well, and he hates it. HAAAAAAAAATES it. It’s been months and he still makes horrible scraping squawky sounds, not because he can’t play it right but because he is suffused with despair. He breaks one reed per practice session. He has to be HOUNDED to practice, and he’s one of those silently stubborn types who doesn’t defy outright, but instead you just turn around and realize he hasn’t been doing it. He will sit there for two hours with his clarinet in his hands, close to tears, NOT practicing it. The other day after he’d spent 45 minutes in mute misery, I sat right next to him being encouraging and “WOOOOOO!” and “Yay for a concert!” and then “You know, the sooner you get this done, the sooner you’ll get to play a video game!” and then “Okay, now do it” and “Okay, seriously” and eventually “Are you kidding with this??” for a FULL HOUR, and finally ran out of available time to spend on that project and sent him to his room to stare at a wall for 30 minutes.

So! My inclination is to take him out of it. Working against this inclination are these things:

1. Rob will DIE OF THE INJUSTICE. He will IMPLODE, and then EXPLODE, and then he will turn to smoke and block out the sun.

2. I don’t want to encourage William’s stubborn streak, and it seems like this teaches him that if he just keeps silently resisting, he will get his way. (But, er, this might be a true lesson.)

3. I would like to help him overcome the “I don’t want to do it so I will sit here and let despair overwhelm me rather than getting over it” thing—so that he will also be able to overcome the inevitable future situations that involve that same thing. But I’ve exhausted my repertoire of advice and techniques and pep talk and he’s still not over it.

4. I would like to teach him to finish out a commitment without bailing.

5. I really think it’s a good idea for kids to learn music.

Working FOR this inclination are these things:

1. I have X amount of time and energy to spend on each child. “Forcing him to practice his clarinet” is taking up a large portion of his share of attention.

2. I want to avoid teaching him to HATE MUSIC, and I’m afraid that that’s what I’m doing by forcing this. He used to sit around picking out tunes on the keyboard but he’s stopped doing that.

3. Clarinet is one of his Monday Stress Things.

4. GEEZ AM I EVER SICK OF FORCING HIM.

5. I don’t think I covered the “You’ll have to do this for a full school year” aspect as thoroughly with William as I did with Rob. I’m also not completely solid-footed on this principle to begin with: IS it good for character to finish out a commitment no matter what, or is it better to teach concepts such as “sunk costs” and “cutting losses” when something isn’t working out? I could go either way on this.

6. It IS good for children to learn music. But he’s not learning it this way.

So. This is the matter before the group: What should be young William’s music-lesson fate?

The news at our house is BABY FISHIES. In the comments section of the post about the fish, Steph said it looked like I had both male and female fish and that the females looked pregnant. Me: *flipping out with both panic and glee*

Later that same day, William was watching the fish and he yelled out “BABY FISH BABY FISH I SEE A BABY FISH!!” and we all went rushing over and there were two tiny baby fish in the tank. I did some mad Googling and some mad Steph-emailing, and so far we know there are at least two babies that are alive as of this morning—but we are trying not to get too attached. It’s touch-and-go because the grown-ups eat the babies, you see. And it’s hard to tell what’s going on because the babies are very good at hiding. Maybe babies are being continually born and eaten and we just keep seeing new ones, or maybe there are only two but they have good survival skillz. And we don’t even know if these are baby platies or if they might be baby MINNOWS. What a wild and crazy time to be alive!

Adults swimming. One particular fish is almost always separate from the others.

SOME sites suggest letting nature take its course in this situation: the grown-up platys are, um, PROLIFIC BREEDERS, so if you make special arrangements for the babies you can end up with a tank overrun with fish. Other sites suggest an in-tank baby fish nursery, and I got one of those but have been unable to catch the babies. (The way you’re supposed to do it is put the mama fish in the nursery until she has the babies, then remove her—but I am not even sure I know which ones are pregnant, and their pregnancies last 4 weeks so I don’t want to coop them up for a really long time, and wouldn’t she just eat her babies right away if they were in a little box and unable to hide? Gruesome.)

Other sites suggest removing the babies to another tank, and we even HAVE another tank but it’s unheated; also see note about not being able to catch the babies. Other sites (and also Steph) suggest adding more small plants for the babies to hide in, so that’s the current plan.

We spend a lot of time gathered around the tank looking for babies and shouting “I SEE ONE, I SEE ONE!!–oh wait, that’s a flake of food.”

Adults, cruising for babies to eat.
(And see, there’s that one apart from the others again.)

Rob is twelve. TWELVE. Twelllllllllve. We have already noted at our house that this is the last year before we have teenagers in the house (and that after that, we will have teenagers for THE NEXT FIFTEEN YEARS SOLID). “The last year before ____” is kind of neat, or at least I thought it was when I was 9, and when I was 12, and when I was 29. And there are TONS of them all clumped together ahead of Rob: there’s 12 (last year before teens), then 15 (last year before driver’s license), then 17 (last year before voting, smoking, and legal adulthood), then 19 (last year before the twenties), then 20 (last year before alcohol).

But what really brought our new situation to my attention was that he can now take doses of medicine for “adults and children 12 years and older.” This has been a thrilling transition, but difficult to make: the day before his birthday, he could have one tablet of acetaminophen; the next day, he could DOUBLE that dose? (No, no—I get that it doesn’t really work that way. But I was dosing by looking at the label and not really thinking about it, so effectively it DID work that way.) I’ve been reluctant to do it, even though Rob is now 5’3″, the height of many adult women, and surely THEY take the adult dosage.

This reminds me a little of the “ages 3 and up” toys: there is such a long stretch of time when it seems like every toy would mean horrible, horrible headlines if I let the child play with it and then Something Happened—and then suddenly we are free, in an open meadow with Ages 3 and Up toys all around us, free to purchase and play with, no more imaginary headlines like “UNFIT MOTHER GIVES 2-YEAR-11-MONTH CHILD A TOY MEANT FOR CHILDREN 3 AND UP—AND PAYS TERRIBLE AND FULLY-DESERVED PRICE!!”

Or of the time right after pregnancy/breastfeeding are finished, when suddenly my body was my own again. I can drink coffee without even THINKING about it! I can take cold medicine when I’m sick! I can have broccoli and tuna without later wondering if that’s why the baby is crying! NO ONE IS TAPPED INTO MY SYSTEM EXCEPT ME! Why, I could do STREET DRUGS and they wouldn’t even get NEAR the baby! It’s like we have a plastic barrier between us!

And now the first of my children can take an adult dose of painkiller or cough syrup. It’s the beginning of a whole new era! Soon I’ll be serving him a cocktail before dinner, and trying to make him vote for my candidate instead of Paul’s! [Edit: I’m kidding about the voting thing. Paul gets very prim about voting, saying “It’s private” if I try to discuss who we’re voting for, so I’ve told him I’ll just go ahead and assume he’s voting opposite of me, then. But I think we always vote the same, or close to the same. (That is, we might disagree on the local board, or we might disagree in the primaries, but we agree on the party and the president.)]

During my first marriage, when I was 20 years old, my in-laws came to visit us for the first time. One day while they were there, the mail came with four letters, each notifying us of one or more bounced checks, with huge scary fees on each one. I’d NEVER bounced a check before. Instead of putting the letters aside and dealing with them later, I was all upset and I explained why. So my father-in-law tried to figure out what happened, by GOING THROUGH OUR CHECKBOOK. Furthermore, he kept saying things like, “$5 for a mail-away crockpot cookbook? Did you even verify if this company EXISTS? You’ll never see THAT check again,” and “$70 at Target?? What FOR??”

He finally did find the error, and it was a stupid and simple math error (adding rather than subtracting) that had made me think we had a thousand dollars more than we did have. And I would have been more grateful to him for finding it if he hadn’t completely laid bare for humiliation every single purchase we’d made, as if the things we’d spent money on were to blame for the error. And if he hadn’t made me feel utterly and eternally incompetent for having made a stupid and simple mistake.

I have been known to over-assume a “one strike and you’re out” policy in relationships: one mistake and I can assume someone else will never let my non-mistakes outweigh it; one point of disagreement and I can assume the other person won’t want to be friends anymore (and the internet, with its “YOU SAID ONE THING I DON’T LIKE AND SO NOW I’M DONE READING YOUR BLOG!!!” does nothing to make me think I’m over-assuming it, either). But whether or not it’s generally true and whether or not I’m usually right, I did think in this situation that my father-in-law would now never think of me as a competent adult. It was one of the many sources of relief I felt at the divorce: now I could start over, with a clean slate and a balanced checkbook, with no one in my new life knowing I’d made a math error.

(The actual error, as I know now, was that I let him take the checkbook and fix the error.)

Speaking of shopping, today’s trip to Target didn’t result in any Awesome Finds (oh, wait, I did get a red-and-white holiday-season-type sweater for Elizabeth for $5), but a trip afterward to the fish store resulted in a lengthy consultation with a fish-expert-type person and also in five new additions to the Thistle household. Meet platys 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, who will remain unnamed until they have survived a reasonable period of time.

You know what’s tricky? Photographing FISH.