The Day We Saved a Mouse Named Cheese-It
If you’ve ever been around kids, you know curiosity usually wins over logic.
A few weeks ago, we caught a mouse in our house. My husband got it away from our cat and tossed it outside on the porch. It sat there for quite some time, stunned. Dave told me to peek out the door. By the time I realized I was looking at a mouse, our girls had already decided she was our newest family member. They named her Cheese-It.
Cheese-It lived in the garage for almost a week. She was hand-fed bird seed, taken to the park, and even went down the slide. The girls carried her everywhere, giggling and laughing and insisting she was “so happy to be rescued.” After surviving a run-in with our cat, she got the full spa-day treatment: warm hands, a shoe box with the amenities a mouse needs, and all the love two little girls could give a mouse.
Then one day, she escaped - right in the middle of a school day. Heartbreak. Total devastation.
I told the girls Cheese-It had gone off to live her best life - a cozy mouse apartment somewhere in the garage, complete with acorns and insulation fluff for bedding. But secretly, I think she’s still in here somewhere, watching me while I clean drywall dust and acorn debris from our unexpected laundry-room demo (story from another day).
The irony isn’t lost on me. This same house once introduced me to my first “live-in” mouse the hard way - a little one caught on a sticky trap that I absolutely did not set. I remember that morning workout turning into a scary movie as the mouse fell from the heating duct onto the floor where I was doing my squats. Since then, we’ve caught a few and released them live, and while vacuuming debris behind drywall recently, I even discovered the tiny skeleton of one long gone. It’s unsettling, but it’s also part of the story this house keeps telling.
And yet, my kids only see wonder.
They see a tiny heartbeat that deserves kindness. They see adventure where I see chaos. They’ve made friends out of the things I once feared.
When I was their age, I wouldn’t even step into the yard if squirrels were out. My poor mom had to come outside and clap her hands to chase them off so I’d walk into the house after getting off the school bus. My grandma’s stories of rabies shots in the stomach scarred me for life - I can still hear her voice warning me not to touch any rodent bc the could carry rabies. So it took me a few days to hold Cheese-It myself, but I finally did. And in that moment, I realized how much the edges of fear soften when we learn from our kids.
They don’t see “mess.” They see life happening. They see a mouse worth naming, a story worth remembering, a reason to laugh and love.
Maybe that’s the real heart of parenting - learning to find the beauty in what once made you panic. The proof that even in the most unexpected places - under a washer, behind drywall, or in the tiny hands of two giggling girls - life is busy being lived.
