The MOUSE HUNT!

I seem to have forgotten a very interesting part of our trip. Something that will probably haunt me the rest of my life. 

I will just start from the beginning. 

Wednesday night we pulled in to Caleb's Aunt and Uncle's house in Irvine, California. It is a beautiful house in a really nice neighborhood. Caleb and I, and Aaron and Rachel and Johnny were all sleeping in the bonus room. We were all getting settled in and ready for bed when all of a sudden Johnny comes running up the stairs, a terrified look on his face. "I just saw a rat in the kitchen" He told us. To which we all laughed. "You did not see a rat in the kitchen. Do you know what a rat is? Rats do not live in Suburban California." Caleb and I gave him the hardest time, we thought it was particularly funny. 

So Caleb and I make our bed. It is on a bed frame in the bonus room and we climb on top of 3 mattresses and settle into bed. At one point in the night Caleb sits up really quickly and  at the same time he sits up quickly I feel something on my arm. Being as graceful as I am, I flail my arm, partly because Caleb jumping scared me, and partly because I am just so freaked out. (Background: Where we live currently we have been battling spiders, If I feel something creepy crawly a natural reaction of mine is to flail) 

Anyway, after I flung my arm, I saw Caleb kick his feet. I turned to him and said, "What was that??" He looked over at me very quietly and said, "You don't want to know." Once again, my mind went straight to, REALLY LARGE SPIDER.. But no, it was much worse than a really large spider. After some prodding he told me that it was a mouse, and that he had woken up to the mouse running across his face. After I had flicked it off me, it hit his feet where he kicked it off the bed. 

We sat still for a moment, not wanting to wake anyone else up, terrified to go back to sleep, and not sure what to do. At three o'clock in the morning we weren't sure where we would find mouse traps, but were determined to go look. Only, we couldn't find the keys. We had to wake up Rachel to find the keys. Rachel couldn't find them, so she went and told Pam, who was in the other room, what happened. Pam was so freaked out and wanted to know where to go get traps so she went and woke Kris and Ed up. 

While we were waiting to find the keys, I saw a little shadow running along the bottom of the door. We knew it wasn't in the room anymore. We had scared it downstairs. 

Ed, Caleb and I were downstairs looking when all of a sudden Pam spotted it running across the room. I got freaked out, and woke up Aaron to help with the hunt. 

They trapped the thing in the office after a few minutes struggle. It was hilarious to sit far away and hear them arguing and laughing and even screaming like girls. Apparently, Aaron had caught the mouse in a garbage can, and as he was lifting the can the mouse JUMPED out! On the second try they finally caught the stupid thing. They went outside to let it go, not before Ed had shaken it up a little in the can. 

At 5 o'clock in the morning the Mouse Hunt had ended and we all were able to return to our beds and go back to sleep, in theory. There really was no sleeping after a traumatic incident like that.