Good morning, mommy. Here's vermin in your eye.

It's 7:30 in the morning. Your oldest child, on his first day off of school for the summer, wakes up earlier than he ever does on a school day and makes a beeline for your room, where everyone in the household is now sleeping, including his brother and sister, who crept into your bed in the wee hours and are now sleeping with knees and elbows knifed into your ribs.

The oldest child "whispers" that you need to "get UP now" and wakes up the other children. You shoo them out of bed, and they all trot to the family room to watch TV. You reason that you need only 5 more minutes, and surely the 19 month old will be fine for a few minutes until you...zzzzzzz.

You wake to the middle child's voice in your ear, saying, "Mommy. I have a rat from the beach house." This statement doesn't make sense to you because you haven't been to the beach in 10 months, and...rat? You decide he's speaking some 4-year-old nonsense, give him a "mmmhmm" and try to drift back off to snoozeville.

"Mommy. It's a RAT. From the BEACH HOUSE."

This time you open one eye and turn to look at him, ready to chase off the boy and his nutty jibber jabber. And dangling one inch from your eyeball, swinging by a tail now held in the fingers of your young child, is a dead mouse.

For a moment, you close your eyes again. The situation is much too odd to be real. You must be asleep, still dreaming. The four year old disagrees. "Mommy!" he hisses. "It's a RAT!"

You open your eyes again and the thing is still there, it's wretched little claws all balled up, eyes shut tightly, body swinging like a pendulum in front of your nose.

"Is that a real mouse?" you ask the child, who nods earnestly. "Where did you find it?"

"In the family room," he tells you. "Paige found it."

"Wait. Paige touched it?"

"Mmmhmmm."

"Okay, go put that thing down. Now."

He trots away. You lie there for a moment, trying to remember if you'd seen any mice at the beach house last summer, then realize that your children are in the other room playing with a dead rodent, and it occurs to you that you really need to get the hell up.

They've left it for you in the middle of the family room floor and are watching TV again, unfazed by their gruesome discovery. You march them all into the bathroom and scrub their hands, then sweep the mouse into a dustpan and inspect it more carefully. It's a little bloody with a sort of terrified expression frozen on it's little whiskered face. The cats. What a night they must have had.

No match for your morning, though, and the joy of waking up to find a dead mouse swinging in your face. Bodes well for the rest of the day, don't you think?

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