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).

Our life in Muskogee

Anyone remember Bill Murray in Caddyshack? Now picture Brett and our little unwanted rodent house guests. We started with the nice little "catch and release" mouse traps, then graduated to the large "catch and release" trap. I think Brett talked about this extensively in a previous post. Anyway, we are now using the old fashioned deadly traps. I'll let Brett tell how they are working. Just wanted to let everyone know that my husband has officially lost his mind.

On another note, we replaced the Explorer today with a VW Jetta. We did lots of research first and it was rated very high by Consumer Reports. Plus it just looks cool. We got the Blue Graphite color which is a very dark blue. I love the car and it will be much more comfortable to drive then the Explorer.

Nana and Poppy watched Jordan for us while we were car shopping over the weekend. Jordan went to the Renaissance Festival with them today for Nana's birthday. She apparently had a lot of fun and got lots of attention. I wish Brett and I could have been there to enjoy the day, but we spent three or four hours at the car dealership instead.

And the guardrail won...

We put up a good fight, but the guardrail was the clear winner. Poor little "Dora the Explorer" will probably be dismantled and sold. She will be missed... I've decided that our big car seats should be more like infant car seats. Jordan seems to have been very well protected, while I was thrown around the front seat like a rag doll. Anyway, the pictures of the vehicle were posted earlier by Brett, so here is the guardrail.

It's hard to get an idea from the pictures how long the area of destruction really was, but it can give you an idea. I'm not sure how many times we actually hit this thing because it all happened so fast. We were just really lucky that we didn't get hurt worse than we did and that lots of people stopped to help. I'm also very thankful to the Boy Scout organization employees who let Jordan and I wait in their car so that we didn't have to stand out in the rain. They then gave us a ride to Tulsa so that we could get Jordan to her doctor's appointment. I just hope we never have to go through something like that again.

This Means War (and I think we're losing)

On Friday as I was playing my nightly marathon of Grand Theft Auto IV, I was interrupted by the sounds of what can only be described as "the sounds of mice humping". I'm not sure if they were inspired by the racy scenes of GTA IV on the screen or if perhaps the ultrasonic mice evaporators that we purchased were, instead of blaring out an ultra-high frequency noise equivalent of mice nails on a chalkboard (which is what I really hoped they were), blaring out the rodent version of Barry White. Regardless, they were making so much noise that I had to get up and go see what the hell was going on. I opened the storage area underneath of our 55 gallon aquarium to be greeted with what can only be described as a small male mouse attempting to pull on his trousers as he scampered off. At first I thought that the large female had been evaporated successfully by the ultrasonic device but on careful consideration afterwards I think she may have been using a Predator like device to become invisible. I never did see either one of them actually run away but I couldn't find either one of them either.


The day after this encounter, Megan found a small mouse turd on top of the tissue box that she keeps on her bedside table. I think the mice have made their feelings on this clear, the gauntlet has been thrown. At this point I think our only options are to either escalate the conflict to less friendly mice removal means or to surrender to our new mouse overlords.

Before:

After:

(These pictures are the right and left sides of the car from today.)

We kind of sort of totaled our car hydroplaning on the turnpike yesterday. Everyone is fine aside from a few bruses and sore muscles (amen for side impact air bags) but stress is high. It has been officially declared as totaled by the insurance company. Hopefully the check will come somewhat close to how much we still owe on this beast though who knows.

Update

Just wanted to drop in a status update since we haven't recently. Jordan is still growing like a cute little weed and has been pulling up on everything that she can reach. She especially likes to pull up on the TV stand so that it can beam its HD goodness straight into her skull. Jaxon and her continue to play the "I'll play with your toys, you play with mine" game. Jaxon loves her Pooh bear and she loves Big Duck, Squirrel and gross badger rags.

We continue to have uninvited house guests in the form of wee little mice. We caught one every day this week until yesterday. Susan Kath suggested we get an ultrasonic rodent repellent thing but since we still had hamsters so we couldn't do that. Since then they've both passed away so maybe now we should get one. I think the neighbors are getting suspicious about me walking across the street with a strange metal box every day.

R.I.P. Boston Baked Bean and Java Bean (burying them in the backyard reminded me of the hamster graveyard in Garden State). I think we'll hold off on any replacement rodent purchases for now. If Megan wasn't worried about Hantavirus, we could just replace them with mice and solve two issues at once...