My Toddler and the Dead Mouse Incident

You think you’ve seen it all as a mom of five… and then your toddler decides to outdo himself.

So there I am, in the garden, picking blackberries like some Pinterest version of myself. I had this wholesome vision: fresh blackberries for the kids’ pancakes in the morning because I’m a “soft mom.” Or maybe just a muggy one. Either way, I’m out there, basket in hand, living my best cottage-core fantasy.

Zak’s out there with me, toddling about, and suddenly he goes quiet. And every mom knows — silence is never a good sign.

“Zak, you okay, babe?” Nothing.
“Zak, what are you doing?” Still nothing.
I look up and see him sat in the grass, tucked between the bushes, suspiciously still. Alarm bells.

“Zak!” I shout.
He looks up, big grin, and yells back: “He dead!”

Excuse me, what?

I scramble up the garden — and when I say scramble, I mean up a slope that feels more like climbing a flaming mountain than a gentle incline. And there he is. My sweet little boy, sat cross-legged on the grass, happily fingering the mouth of a very dead mouse.

I nearly dropped my blackberries. My brain went into overdrive:

• Oh my God, is he going to get poisoned?

• Can you catch the plague from this?

• Am I raising a baby Dahmer? Norman Bates in a Paw Patrol T-shirt?

“Zak, put that down, it’s ewwww!”
He beams at me: “No, it nice. He dead.”

Nice. And dead. In the same sentence. Fabulous. Just what every parent wants to hear.

After what felt like an eternity, I convinced him to throw the poor mouse back into the bushes. Straight inside we went, where I scrubbed his hands with such force I thought his skin might come off — not to hurt him, but out of sheer terror that he’d caught… well, God knows what.

And the worst part? He’s still talking about it. Apparently tomorrow, he wants to “find more.” Please, Lord, help me.

Fast-forward thirty minutes. Zak’s tucked up in bed, probably dreaming about dead mice, while I’m still shaken. I head back to the garden to collect my abandoned blackberries, and of course, I find myself peering into the bushes for the mouse. Not because I suddenly care about its wellbeing, but because I need to make sure Dahmer Toddler doesn’t wake up in the morning and decide to start dissecting it on the patio with my cutlery.

This kid. Honestly. Built like he has nine lives and determined to take a few years off mine.