I smell a rat.

Literally.

Because this has turned into a pest control blog and not a parenting one, I wanted to give you the much anticipated update on our, ahem, issues:

Raccoons - the shit has worked. Again, literally. We bought $50 worth of mountain lion shit (who knew this was such a lucrative business?) and sprinkled it around our yard. Want to bring your kid over to play? Just watch out for the shit strategically placed around the perimeter of our backyard. If your kid is like mine and likes to put everything in their mouth still, this guarantees lots of fun for all involved. "Sabrina, what are you picking up? Oh my, mountain lion shit...again! Ha ha! Doesn't everyone have predator shit in their backyard?" (And yes, I'm trying to break the blogger record for number of uses of the word shit in one post.) Anyhow, we haven't seen the family of raccoons in a while. I can't decide if this is a good thing and they have decided to not hang out in our yard, or if they've just moved somewhere I can't see them. Like my attic. Which scares the shit out of me just thinking about that.

Ants - Totally had big ass carpenter ants. The exterminator guy confirmed it by checking out the carcasses that remained on the duct tape that I had spread all over every opening in my bathroom sink. I am so resourceful. I'm going to kind of sort of insinuate that we maybe haven't seen any ants since our new BFF, the pest control guy, sprayed for them, but I am very hesitant to come out and say something like, "they're gone!" because I know as soon as I type that, my entire bathroom will be overtaken by them. It's like they know. I don't care to jinx myself so I'm going to just say...things are okay right now.

Rat - So pest control guy put a couple traps under the house. Showed us a couple places where they could have possibly entered, so we sealed them up. Checked the traps for a few days in a row, no rat. Told pest control guy that we could just check the traps and give him a call if we caught one so he could come and get it (because he of course wants to do that, right?) and give us a new trap. Then, somehow, we forgot we should be checking the traps. Which, all we need to do is lift the access to under the house and look, I mean, the traps are right there. It's not like we have to actually go under the house, which is good because that simply wouldn't happen. Has everyone seen The Descent? We don't go into small spaces. We do not go into small spaces where rodents have taken up residence. We hire people for that because we are really big weenies. In fact, just knowing there were traps under there gave me the heebie jeebies big time, and I was having a hard time opening the access to check the traps. It didn't help that Sabrina thought that would be a fine time to come up behind me and bite me on the leg? either. I thought my blood curdling scream would have been enough to kill anything left under the house, but I was wrong. So like a week goes by and we've totally forgotten to check the traps. Until..."Do you smell that? It smells rotten in that bathroom?" Chris claims he doesn't smell anything. I gave him the side-eye but was distracted by Halloween candy and moved on.

Next evening I say, "Have you checked those traps? We should check them." For once, I'm not shaking as I check the traps. I should have been, because there was totally a dead rat hanging from the trap. Oh.My.God. And the smell?? Holy shit. Dead rats stink. It smelled of death. Literally.

Since we're geniuses and wait until Friday night to check the trap, it's up to us to remove the rotting corpse. I'm not going to go into detail because 1) it's gross and 2) makes us look like weenie idiots, but it's gone.

Please make me feel better and tell me rats are independent animals that travel solo and there couldn't possibly be any other rats in the vicinity of our house, ever, ever again? I'm not sure we can handle this.

In unrelated news, Sabrina was a 50's girl for Halloween. I saw a toddler poodle skirt in a catalog and thought, "I could totally make one of those for Sabrina for less than $39.95!"

Only problem is as much as I'd like to sew, I don't really know how. I have a sewing machine, but I can barely get it to work because I have no idea what I'm doing. Still, I tackled the project and it came out alright if you looked at it from a distance. Since I had no idea what I was doing, my cheap alternative quickly added up because I kept having to buy more stuff to "fix" it. I think this might be the most expensive poodle skirt ever.

Oh, and she refused to sit still or smile for any pictures.