I am a wife and mother of three beautiful children. I love to write, do craft, cook, visit the beach, shop, go for walks in picturesque places, play music and sing.
Last Sunday I let out a scream bigger than the one when my son entered the world. Never in my life have I found a mouse in the washing! I asked my husband to help me carry the hamper outside, leaving the other one in the bath. Upon my request, he helped me to check each item of clothing thoroughly; I couldn’t bear to see that mouse again. Nothing was found and I was beginning to think that he felt I was ‘seeing things’. I cringed as I imagined the mouse running down the passageway at night (where I had left the clothes hampers for several days before placing them in the bath), squeezing through a hole in one of them and burrowing into the clothes. How did it get into the house? A couple of years ago when we had a mouse in the kitchen sink cupboard due to the smell of the worm farm scraps, we put aluminium foil in the back of the dishwasher where there was a gap; perhaps it had been displaced.
After my husband carried the clothes hamper inside, he noted Rosie the cat stalking a mouse near the back of the freezer. How could the mouse have gotten inside the house so soon after we carried it out? Unless…
The plot thickened when my daughter called out to me and informed me that her brother had found a tiny mouse out in the back yard and was guarding it. The one I had glimpsed was bigger than that, I remembered. Apart from being stunned, there was nothing wrong with this baby mouse. I trapped it in a soccer cone and my son ran to collect two sand play cups from the outdoor toy box, at my request. “Don’t kill it!”, he begged me. Casting my mind back 30 or so years, I could put myself in his shoes. Stray kittens in my grandparents’ garage, unfit to be given homes, had melted my heart and I pleaded with my parents in a similar way. Sensing he was distraught, I decided that catch and release was the best thing to do.
I must have looked so comical in the green dish gloves which I had forgotten to take off while inside the house. My son and I walked briskly towards a local park and stopped a few hundred metres shy of the entrance. Waiting to be rid of the mouse before it died of shock, I emptied the little baby into the long grass and we walked away.
We were due to go out for the afternoon so we set a trap “just in case” behind the freezer and I returned to the bathroom to retrieve a couple of washing items for soaking. I let out another scream. There was our stowaway, barely moving…in the bath where the washing hamper had been returned. Once again I called upon my husband to help- this time to put it out of its misery. All dealt with, we still wondered about Rosie’s find. Had it been the one that I found in the bath? I didn’t think so. Upon returning home, my thoughts were comfirmed.
As much as I appreciate the council’s efforts to minimise household waste with mini food scrap bins, I can’t help but wonder if it was the smell of rotting food we should have emptied the day before, that brought those germy critters inside again. I hadn’t seen a mouse since I had collected food scraps in a box, waiting to put them in a worm farm. I am pleased to report that we haven’t had any more tiny visitors this week and I have stopped holding my breath whenever I sort the clothes!
Have any small, unwelcome animal visitors entered your home before? Please feel free to share your experiences in the comments or add a link to your own post!
Tonight I tried to write a poem and all I could think of were the things I shouldn’t say. Sometimes it is in the process of writing from the heart that we realise how much pain we have stuffed down deep inside. Only when I wrote the unfiltered thoughts and discarded them could I find some more helpful things to say. I knew I couldn’t fool myself- the writing would be mechanical at best. Sometimes others try to tell us how to write and stifle our creativity. They think it is absolute arrogance that we should ignore their unhelpful opinions. It’s okay to offer suggestions, but when the words cripple our writing hand, I think they are best left unsaid. Usually I am accustomed to being a part of the writing that is given to family members as a gift, since I am known for my ability to compose a poem under time constraints. This time I bowed out gracefully, though it hurt. I am grateful for this blog- a chance to write and share my thoughts for those who are keen to read them. I will not be silenced by the ignorant or the unkind!
I fronted up to my first ballet class almost a week ago and it has taken me that long to recover! Who knew that I would be thrown in the deep end and trying to keep up with someone who started months ago!!! I started at the barre and pictured it being an easy stretching class for adult beginners. Some time later I was asked to stretch as far as I could into the splits. Um… was I hearing correctly? The teacher has every confidence that I will achieve it one day! She told me the first day after a ballet class is the worst- she wasn’t wrong!!!
There were tears the next day- such fatigue that I thought that I would be wiped out for more than a few days. I planned to quit but I recalled that ballet was my preparation to be strong for Irish dance which will see me shred the stubborn pounds in very little time and make me smile because I love it so much! My husband encouraged me to return to ballet next week and so did a few friends. This surprised me enough to listen – often people talk me out of difficult things because I set myself very lofty goals! I will need to scale back the time I spend on the dance floor to start with, but now is not the time to quit!
Yesterday I went to a dance wear place and bought some canvas ballet slippers- the shop assistant who is a dance teacher informed me that they breathe better and don’t fit so tightly as the leather ones when the hot weather comes. Maybe I will be able to feel my toes more this week without tingling; a well-fitted shoe is important ! Learning all those French dance terms and challenging myself to move gracefully, I couldn’t walk away. This is going to take time and for as long as I can, I am going to keep at it.
She hath wings 
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