I think I'm hopeless.

My house has mice in it. I don't hate mice. I used to own them as pets. But they do carry disease and poop on everything, so I went to the store to look at mousetrap options.

We tried the basic mouse trap. Little snap traps. We put peanut butter on them, set them, went to bed, and found them unsnapped and sans peanut butter. So I went back to the store.

All of my other choices at Wal-mart were sticky traps with poison in them, or poison blocks you put in wall cracks so the mice eat them and then run off and die in the wall and smell up your house like dead vermin. So I got the sticky poison traps and figure that the mice would eat the poison and be stuck there until they died.

Yesterday, I came home around 7:00 and noticed on of the sticky traps had moved under the washer a little bit. I picked it up, and there was an adorable little mouse, his eyes still staring at me, in that white boxy trap. I started sobbing. What was I thinking? How could I get something that would cause a mouse to suffer? He must have been terrified when he got stuck!

So Doc comes home and I'm heaving from sobbing so hard. He freaks out thinking I went into labor or there is something wrong with the our baby and when I finally choke out "I..ki-killed a mouse!" He starts trying really hard not to laugh, looks at the mouse in the trap, and then ushers me out of the house to go to dinner.

I finally calm down. Enjoy dinner, and on the drive home started remembering the poor dead mouse. "He didn't even look dead." I commented.

"He wasn't dead." I stared at Doc. "I thought you knew that."

I started losing it again. Turns out I happened to have bought a few traps that were not poisoned sticky traps. Just sticky traps. They catch the mice in them, and they starve to death there or have heart attacks from stress and fear. So we got home, I put on rubber gloves and with tears streaming down my face pulled the trap apart and carefully pried up the little mouse slowly. He lost a lot of fur and squeeked pitifully a few times, but I freed him and set him on the porch outside. He hobbled away, his little feet still kind of sticky.

The moral of the story. We are using catch and release traps only from now on...and I may have put some cheese on the porch after Doc went to bed.