Mouse in the House

This is what my closet looked like yesterday morning. It was a mandatory cleaning due to an unwanted guest. The kids were playing in my closet and Brennan made a discovery.

Yes, we had a mouse. After cleaning all of the top shelves on Lance's side of the closet, and finding what I thought to be the mouse's nest, I thought my job was done. I was wrong. For some reason, the mouse was enamoured with one of my sweaters. This is the remnants of what it removed from the main body of the sweater.

This is the fabulous new design that that sweet little creature left for me.

I was thrilled. It also chose to chew a few holes in the beautiful quilt that Lance's great grandmother made for him. I feel sick about it.

The best part of the story is that while I was on the phone with my sister-in-law, Jodie, telling her all about the three hours of closet cleaning that I had done, and the mountains of laundry I was in the midst of, I picked up a blanket to put it in the washer, and out ran the mouse. It frightened me a-so that I hung up on Jodie. Fortunately, Daisy is an excellent mouser. She chased it into the bathroom where I was able to trap it under an empty coolwhip bowl. Sophie's friend, Kelli, was there, and thought that the whole ordeal was so exciting and fun that I should release the mouse and chase it some more. I didn't like that idea, so I let it go outside. My guess is that it's missing the warm home that it thought it had. We're wondering what it was eating? Sweater? Blanket? Plastic bags? Hmmm.

Baby Bird

I'm always complaining that my kids don't play outside as much as I'd like them to (my fault, I know, I should kick them out and lock the doors). Maybe it's a good thing, because when they do play outside, they bring homes things such as this recently hatched baby bird. They really wanted to try feeding it, so we soaked a piece of dry cat food in some water, and fed it with a dropper. At one point I though we had killed it for sure. It's throat was swollen to the size of a small grape with the food we had given it. Within an hour it had managed to swallow it, and was asking for more.
Amazingly enough, it lived through the night. I can't stand to let it starve to death, and I'm not going to intentionally kill it, so what can I do besides keep feeding it?

It's really quite an ugly little critter. One of those, "it's so ugly it's cute" things.
It doesn't have it's eyes open yet, and is mostly bald. I'm guessing that it's one of those little brown birds that are everywhere around here.
The cry for food!