I like to call where we live "the fake country," a place where your neighbor might have, in their otherwise perfectly suburban yard, a goat pen. Or, more inexplicably, a horse. A place where the waitress at your local diner might tell you that working through her 3rd trimester hasn't been that hard at the restaurant, it's milking the cows on her farm that is really killing her.
Most of the time I love living here. It's the best of both worlds, where I can stroll past the horse farm during my walk (not to be confused with the suburban house, where there is only one horse) and drive less than 15 minutes to get sushi (and it's good sushi, too.) Sometimes, though, it can make life a little awkward. In places like story-time, for instance, that mecca for stay-at-home suburban moms who are willing to do anything to get out of the house, even if it involves the public humiliation of dancing to "head, shoulders, knees and toes" as if it were actual music.
The theme for Storytime last week was mice. All the books featured friendly, adorable mice doing things like having tea parties, making cookies, and playing hide-and-seek. We played a game involving matching colored felt mice to colored felt clocks and sang songs about how you should never, ever, scoop up the field mice and bop them on the head.
Settling in to read the sequal to "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie,"* the librarian asked the kids what they would do if they saw a mouse in their house. One little girl said that she would have a tea party (inspired by the book we'd just read), one little boy claimed that he might keep the mouse as a pet. Lucy looked over her peers with that blunt, straightforward way she has and then loudly (so loudly! I really cannot emphasize enough how loudly) yelled out over the other children, "I would put the mouse in a trap! Then throw it in the garbage!)
The librarian chuckled, and the other parents looked at me in horror. But what can I say? Twice a year when the field in front of our house is plowed, we actually do have mice visiting our house, and when they do.....we kill them and throw the trap away. Although the mice we get can be kind of cute (they look exactly like the Frisbys from The Rats of Nymh, tiny little things with a habit of hopping more than scurrying and standing on two paws instead of all fours) my girls are not at all sentimental about them. All the books in the world might anthropomorphize mice, but when my kids see a mouse they see something that is a pain in the neck anywhere but outdoors, what with all the pooping and eating of chocolate chips that they do.
Oh, well. We luckily weren't going for the "most sheltered" award at the library anyway. I do wish Lucy would learn to control her volume a little better, though.
*
Am I the only one out there who thinks they are starting to milk the "If you give a..." cash cow to death? I love the "Mouse...Cookie" book, I was on board with the Pig and her pancakes, we even own the one about the Moose and his Muffins...but it's all starting to feel a little done-to-death, isn't it? I mean, there are only so many overly-pushy animals in the world.
T
