Mouse

I forgot to tell a story. We had a mouse. In our house. Disgusting. Well I figured it must have come through the fireplace. (Why do we have a fireplace in an apartment, you ask? I ask the same question. Pointless. We actually have our tv stand in front of it so the kids don't play in it.) We saw it run from the tv stand under the sofa/chair. We immediately got up and tried to figure out what to do. Luis thought we could catch it. I wasn't so sure. Turns out Luis is a little afriad of mice. (He actually thought it was a rat, but it wasn only 2-2 1/2 inches, "maybe it's a baby rat,"  I said no.) So here we are both with frying pans in our hands, and I am trying to convince it to come out from where it;s hiding. I'm banging my pan on the couch. We see it run. But Luis apparently didn't get the message that it was supposed to be team work. He is no where close to me or the couch. It runs back under the tv stand. I tell him I quit for the night. The blasted mouse is too fast anyway. Luis thinks we should bring both kids into our room (afriad the mouse will bite them or do something horrible to them). I told him I'm prety sure the mouse doesn't want to eat us, just the food our kids leave on the living room floor. I finally win that argument. And Manny is still up. Ever the little helper, he had grabbed something to try to hit it with. And then he told me, "Don't worry, I locked the bathroom door so he can't go in there." "Wait, you locked the bathroom door? And you're not in there?" "No."  So the next half hour was spent trying to unlock the door. We have those silly doors with the turn lock, not the pop button. Sadly.
Don't worry, this story gets better. So the next day I go to the store and pick up some glue traps. (This is what everyone told me to get. The snap ones are sometimes tricky and don't set right, and some other reasons people said. Glue traps were the way to go.) I bring them home and the directions say to place them in a path the mouse goes and then, "after use, dispose of entire trap" and it shows a picture of someone throwing the trap in the garbage (from the bottom, you don't actually see the mouse). After the kids go to bed I place 2 traps, one on either side of the fireplace. The next morning I see one, but not the other. I ask Luis if he moved one. No. I look closer and discover the poor mouse got stuck and tried to drag himself back to the fireplace. Of course it is still alive and terrified. Luis sees this and is instantly sad, for the mouse, that I got the traps, that I am a mean person, etc. And he doesn't want any part of it. Apparently I am a stoneheart (which may be true) and can do terrible things. I want to kill him fast, but am not quite sure what to do. Drop something on him? Throw him really hard? Luis doesn't think I am strong enough. A hammer? But that might get messy. Obviously I have never done this before, and the solution is now obvious, but it wasn't at the time. Luis tells me to run him over with the car. Okay. I go to the car, place the trap upside down and run him over fast. I go to remove the trap and discover the glue is sticky. Very sticky. Sticky enough that I can't pull it off the cement. Luckily I had some nice neighbors who were willing to look past my stupidity and help me out. They sprayed something and got him off.
So next time (hopefully there won't be a next) I will either get the snap traps or put the mouse in a bag before I do anything. I know. What a dummy.