Home Sweet Daycare

We had quite a weekend getting ready for a change in our routine and I think we mostly pulled it together in time. Starting yesterday the nice grandmotherly lady that we've been contracting to watch Jordan and Lucy had to move from Lucy's parents house to our house. They're trying to frantically finish renovations so that they can finally sell their house and skedaddle off to Nevada and I guess the girls weren't helping. Over the weekend we had to "OMG FINISH BABY PROOFING" from the living room to the kitchen, install baby gates, put down the play rug, clean clean and clean some more, replace the cheapo toilet seat that broke, vacuum up the mouse turds from the newly discovered ex-hiding places that we found, put the last few boxes away and re-activate our Vonage account since Celfa doesn't have a cell phone. I finally went to bed around 1 A.M. Monday morning after doing the last load of dishes.

The upside is that our house is now clean and baby proofed and Celfa cleaned our coutertops and stove while she was watching the babies. She can stay.

Mission Accomplished

Megan wanted to "cut and run" in typical liberal fashion and call in some fancy exterminator to take care of our "mouse problem". Well let me tell you, 3 weeks and $4 dollars later and I'm saying "Problem solved!". It was brutal at times but freedom doesn't come without sacrifice. I tried reasoning with them, I tried to turn them away from a life of villainy and pooping on my counter tops but at some point you have to have a more pro-active approach to dealing with assaults on your home and that time finally came.

I think for me the final straw was finding that the dog food, which we keep ON TOP OF THE REFRIGERATOR,
had been violated and yes, there was mouse feces there too now. I spent a $1.25 on some old school Tom and Jerry style traps and set 4 of them up in the house. The first night all four traps were either sprung or had their bait removed. The mastermind mouse, a huge beast of a rodent, was caught on the second night. I think this spooked the rest because that day we caught two more in the "catch and release" trap. Instead of dropping them off across the street though, I took them to a park across town. I didn't want to see them again. After that day it was a series of check trap, re-bait and throw out traps that had caught something. We caught a mouse a day for a week solid. Finally I think its over, we're on day 3 now without tripping a trap or having the bait stolen so I'm happy. Now we just have to clean up all of the poop they left behind and try and plug the holes that they entered our house from in the first place (which is icky and full of spiderwebs and gross stuff so I'm procrastinating).