burning down the house

I walked into my bedroom to find Erisabeth, our cheetah, sitting on top of my bedside lamp, which was on. I immediately pulled her off. Her tummy was warm but no where near combusting. Luckily. I had been letting David, Ariana, and our neighbor Asher bounce all over the bed. Obviously, I should have done the "Is anything going to burn the house down?" check before I left the room.

the poop

Tuesday night Rose got in the car at Aunt Julia's house and said, "Oh, yuck! What's that smell!" Yup, she had stepped in dog poop. I scraped the mat. I scraped her shoe. I solved the problem.

Wednesday afternoon, David and I were getting into the car at Aunt Julia's house, and I said, "What's that smell?" Yup, I had stepped in dog poop. Luckily, I had not yet stepped in the car. I congratulated myself on my quick thinking and got to work scraping off my shoes. In the meantime, David refused to get in his car seat and bounded all over the car tracking, you guessed it, poop on the mats, the car seat handles, his new rain coat, my water bottle. . . It was grim.

I knelt in front of school wiping his shoes on the grass, and everyone knew exactly what was going on and gave me the sympathy I so greatly needed. Someone also suggested a car detailer just blocks away. So, back at Aunt Julia's house (parked far away from the poop zone), I did an initial cleaning and made a detailing appointment. For a lot of money, our car is now completely poop free and glistens to boot.

the rats

Aggh! I can hear them skittering above my head right now. I hope pretty soon I hear the snap of a trap.

Tuesday night the rats announced their presence with authority. They scrambled around the attic making so much noise they woke me up and freaking me out so bad I couldn't go back to sleep.

If you recall, we've been handling this problem for over a year and didn't have much confidence in the rat company we'd been working with. I kept saying the technician was stupid. (John heartily concurred.) But everyone kept saying, "What do you expect? He's a rat catcher." Well, we hired a different company and the president of the company was our technician today. I like him. He actually named five different ways he thought the rats were getting in and made a plan for blocking them all. We signed up for the regular maintenance. If the problem isn't going away, I want to be on top of it. And really, I want to be able to sleep tonight.

homework

Mommy: You should probably get started on your homework.
Rose: I don't want to do my homework.
Mommy: Ok. You don't have to.