broken teddy

Picture this mommy moment: I am sitting down during the lil one's afternoon nap to saw up the iconic teddy.

Now awake from the reverie: Teddy (who is the little one of a pair; the big one is Ted of course) was not worn down by overuse ; he had been torn to pieces by a mouse.

A mouse? A rat maybe, in fact, given the size of the thing. But in this household we choose to refer to it as Henrietta the mouse - that lets me sleep better at night. Henrietta sure partied it up while we were away: in less than a week she stashed a nice little pile of 4 dozen walnuts, 3 dozen rigatoni pasta tubes, a few swedish bread rolls, 2 sponges; she chewed on our wooden dish rack, ate a few limbs of stuffed animals, crawled all over the place and uh marked her territory every where. Yuck. Arg. Icky. Was I ever so unpleased to be coming home. The worst offense? She grabbed the afore-mentioned teddy off of the little one's crib (I still don't let myself dwell on this image - too scary) and dragged it for a meal underneath our bed. I am not too weak of heart, but I didn't sleep well until Henrietta the mega-mouse was taken care of.

Henrietta was American. Or British. Clearly. She chose the peanut butter trap over the French cheese trap.

Now in addition to the glaring nightlight, we sleep with a electric mechanism that supposedly keeps rodents away and sounds maddeningly like a leaking faucet.

The things we adjust too...