If You Give a Mouse Some Chocolate...

...it will want to live in your pantry forever.

We've been seriously deep cleaning and decluttering our house for about two weeks now.  There are a lot of items that haven't had a place in the rooms we've been clearing out, so they ended up in the pantry.  Namely, three large bags of gift bags, some mason jar boxes that I wanted to keep to organize the freezer, a winter blanket, a mattress pad, and some bulk kitty litter, baking soda, and vinegar.  They make it difficult to get into the pantry, but we've been eating a lot of fresh food, so it didn't matter too terribly much.

I went down to get some rolled oats for Oatmeal Pancakes a la Momzoo, and I saw something very disheartening:  two chocolate bars had the corners gnawed off.  I was just down there getting a bar of chocolate the other day and they were fine.  A closer look showed mouse-sized teeth marks.  It could have possibly been our cats, but I doubted it.  The door is always shut and latched.

Then I saw this:

And this:

We do in fact have a mouse (or mice).  When I started pulling things out of the pantry, Wicket got excited.  She jumped all over everything, sniffing it.

And when she had her fill of that, she visited the back of the pantry itself.

We left the door open for the cats to peruse the pantry at their leisure.  I expected to wait a few days before anything happened.  But *B* and I were watching TV tonight when the cats were pouncing around, and we heard a squeak.  There he was!  In our living room, a whole floor above the pantry.  *B* and I sprang into action and scooped him into an empty kitty litter bucket.

He is so CUTE!   *B* liberated him in a strategically distant location.  I'm hoping that he was the only one for two reasons.  One, I don't want to have to worry about having mice in the house.  Two, if there are more mice, there is a greater likelihood that the cats will finish them off before