How irreplaceable

[cirianz]

Just pottering & I opened a drawer and found that the collection of little notes & pictures that I had saved & kept over the years from my son Morgan have been chewwed up and turned into mouse bedding.
For those who don't know Morgan is severely dyslexic and even now, when he is heading towards 15 he still cannot read or write more than the most simple text without help. All of the notes that we parents save like that. The little pictures & I love you's are all special.
But the amount of love and dedication that it took him to make each one and the very rarity of them made these so precious.
And they're all gone.
There's still bits & pieces of old schoolwork & the like lying around from when he was a kid I expect. But these notes were so rare that even such a queen of clutter & mess as myself kept them tidied away, safe, and together.
I should know better i suppose, whenever i try to be tidy it always kicks me in the butt.
Mice.
God why couldn't they just stick to raiding the food?
And the irony is that it would be Morgan himself who would kill me if I set traps.
Nothing to do about it I suppose. I'll have to tell him when he comes home on monday. i expect he'll be like thinking "why would you want to keep that old stuff anyway" But he'll know why well enough that he won't actually say it.
Ah well.
Nothing to be done now I suppose

 

[Taffycat]

I'm sorry to hear that Ciri... mice are so destructive and have no respect for things we might cherish. But I can understand how Morgan feels... being a hater of traps myself (though I know they're necessary sometimes.... such as the occasion when they managed to get into our loft! We couldn't risk them nibbling through electrical wiring and what-not.)

Perhaps when he sees how upset you are, your son will replace one or two of the lost notes(?) It won't be quite the same, of course, but...

Here's something to cheer you up a little

[Youtube]G4CCzzuTtZs[/Youtube]

 

[cirianz]

One of the ironic things is that we (ie Morgan) had actually caught all of the mice at one point. We had been going to catch them & release them in a field down the road but there's things you can learn from observation that you just can't learn from books & documentaries & even google so we turned it into an impromptu school project, set Up a large empty aquarium with a bed-cave, random bedding, branches a running wheel & food & water & Morgan set about catching them using a lunch box propped open with a stick with a piece of cotton tied to it. Over the course of a week he caught 9 field mice in his bedroom & we popped them in the aquarium & except for changing food & water & a weekly cleaning we left them alone & just watched.
It was fascinating.
We have pet rats & have had pet mice in the past so we were curious to see how the wild field mice would adapt & behave & if they would be different from 'pet' mice (they were). We were careful not to handle them since the idea was to release them down the road at the end so we didn't want them getting tame. And it really was a fascinating project. I'm quite sure that their skeletal structure defies some essential laws of physics.
Most of them escaped after about 2-3 weeks, I went over the damn set-up... I'm still sure there is no way they could've done it without bending space-time in some sort of geeky quantum fashion & I've seen some of the impossible sized spaces they can fit through (more than once i saw one or other of them fit through a space that, when I measured it was less than 3mm wide. their skulls alone are wider than that!)
But a couple of them seemed quite contented (& very fond of the mouse wheel, a small size designed for baby mice, which the got on or off by simply walking through the gaps in the bars even while it was turning.) & they hung around for about 6-7 weeks before they wandered out as well.
The mice still live in our kitchen & while they are annoying & generate masses of cleaning they are also amusing & we know them all by sight after the project.
Every so often I a bit fed up with the washing or discovering they've worked out how to get into the bread-bin or the like & cleaned us out. And then I'll make noises about catching them again & releasing them down the field but Morgan prefers to just wait until spring.
Although we don't usually get inundated like this we usually have a couple move in each winter & out again come spring.
Myself I'm not so sure these ones will want to leave, I think they reckon they've got a bit of a cushy deal here. & sometimes when I'm particularly upset over something they've destroyed I'll talk about traps, but even I'm too mushy to want to actually use them under normal circumstances. And when you've observed something enough to recognise them individually & know their personality differences you can't seriously plan to kill them. I can't anyway. & Morgan would never forgive me.
But this is something more than just an annoyance
It's irreplaceable & heartbreaking
It's also somewhere they don't usually hang out either (they don't like the lounge, my dogs live there & Skye has killed two of them in there so they stay away) so it was a complete surprise.