If You Give a Mouse a Potato

The true story of the mischievous rat that lives in my couch

Based on the book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Joffe Numeroff

If you give a mouse a potato (by accident)

He’s not going to ask for another one.

He’ll just take it, without permission.

When you buy more potatoes,

You’ll probably hide them inside a bucket so he can’t get at them.

When you want to cook them

You’ll discover they got all moldy

And realize you’ve been tricked

By a small fur-ball

With a brain the size of an almond.

When the potatoes are polished off,

He’ll probably start in on the eggs

Which will make you really mad…

So mad, you’ll probably bait a mouse trap with a dollop of your precious peanut butter

And hide it behind his favorite hideout:

The living room couch

Which will lead you to discover

That he is actually not a mouse at all, but a rat

No wonder he didn’t eat the peanut butter;

He is too big to fit through the mousetrap door.

You know this because you saw him poke his head out of the chair in the living room.

But that’s ok, you didn’t like that chair anyway.

It looks squashy but it’s not.

Since he couldn’t reach the peanut butter

And you hid the potatoes

And Nauela hasn’t sold eggs in 8 months

And raw onions probably make rats cry too

He’ll might chew all the labels off your containers

And then start in on the containers themselves.

Even if there’s nothing in them.

He won’t realize until it’s too late

That he’s chewed through the bottom of a bottle of bleach

And spilled it everywhere.

But he won’t learn from his mistake.

He’ll also chew through a bottle of oil.

But after letting the oil loose

He’ll feel a rumble in his stomach.

So he’ll decide to try the onions after all.

He may hide a bunch of them behind your charcoal sack in the corner.

The charcoal will make him think that

Maybe he wants a potato.

And chances are, if he eats one potato,

He’s going to take another without asking.

Left: mousetrap. Right: Stuffing that he pulled
out of the couch and left in a pile. Bed? Soft landing?
 Playground? You'll have to ask him yourself.

This liter of oil was full when I left my house
one week before. Now most of it is on the kitchen
floor and sunken into the wooden table.

He keeps a collection of onions behind the charcoal. Sneaky.