My husband informed me a week ago that we have a mouse. An icky, poo-dropping vermin has invaded the little angel's pristine environment. Okay, there were already a few hairballs. And some dust. But otherwise, very pristine.

My husband stalked the mouse for days, first by insisting we get rid of the candy jar and sealing the cat food, then by installing peanut-butter-infused traps wherever we found little turd evidence of the rodent. "Here, mousie, mousie," my husband would trill lightly. "Come on out and fight like a man."

Then it seemed to go away. Until last Friday, when my friend J. and her baby were here. J. had her son, also J., on the floor changing his little diaper. I was watching, fascinated by the precautions one must take when one has an always-armed little BOY, when I saw movement in my peripheral vision. Out from under the armoire crawled a fat, gray mousie!

"Get the baby off the floor!" I screamed with the authority of a firefighter, a middle-school principal, Donald Rumsfeld on a good day. I scooped up the little angel and threw her, bouncy seat and all, on the dining room table and ran to the kitchen for a proper mousie-entrapping device. I couldn't find a hand grenade, so I grabbed a colander instead.

"Sybil, get the mouse!" cried J., dangling her baby and dancing back and forth along the top of the couch. My 15-year-old cat, Sybil, took one look at the mouse and ran for the hills. She is useless. I didn't even care if she KILLED the mouse, I just wanted her to scare it away by acting all badass and cat-like, but oh, no, she is a first-class freeloader. More on that at a later date. Bad kitty.

I threw the colandar on top of the mouse, who was apparently either too stunned or too drugged from slurping D-con in the basement to move.

"What if he can move the colander?" said J., still on the couch.

"Good thinking," I replied, and added a pinecone-stuffed vase to the top of the colander.

"What if he can breathe through all those holes?" said J., still on the couch.

"Right-o," I said, retrieving a plastic bowl fit for suffocating mousies from the kitchen, and inserting it between the colander and the vase. At this moment, my friend C. arrived with her baby, N. A veritable vermin extravanganza was playing out for all of my new-mommy friends, and I was helpless to rid our baby playground from rodents. What a good friend I am!

So I did what any normal, strong, independent woman would do. I called my husband and shrieked, "Get in the car right now and come home and kill this mouse!"

And of course, he did. My hero.