Sometimes you have to stop and smell...whatever died in the wall

The last couple of weeks around our house have been all about ears and noses.

The problem with Monkey's sleeping I wrote about a couple of weeks ago turned out to be not teething, but a double ear infection. It took me almost six days of his crazy behavior (plus a fever) to figure out something was really wrong and take him to the doctor. I felt particularly silly about that because, during the first year and a half of Monkey's life, I probably took him to the doctor four or five different times thinking that he had an ear infection when he didn't. Sigh.

The silver lining was that I got a nice little Mommy lesson, which is when MLM doesn't seem like himself, there is probably a reason.

The nose problem has been even less pleasant and more pervasive...

We've discovered a major problem with buying a house in a wooded area that has been vacant for a couple of years and has an easily accessible water supply nearby... rodents. What we thought was a past problem when we moved in has turned into a parade of disgusting as we, and our pest control company, try to take back our house from its former residents. Roof rats, I am told, though I'm grateful not to have seen it for myself.

The good news is, we haven't seen any critters or their, ahem, tracks in our actual living space. They've been partying in the attic and the crawl space, and using the voids in the walls as their little rodent floo network back and forth. The bad news is that the pest control company's special bait -- which was supposed to send Mickey and company out of the house in search of water, where they would die somewhere I could pretend was a pleasant place full of cheese and classical music -- has unfortunately backfired. At least one, maybe two, of our uninvited guests did not find his way out into the yard before meeting his demise.

It started as a faint smell in our bathroom; then spread to almost every room in the house. Two men from the pest control company came out, climbed ladders, wandered around for a couple of hours and confirmed that, yes, something had died in our wall. Next to an air duct. Sweet.

Could they fix it? Well, maybe. They'd be drilling holes in our walls, piping in their cameras, which might not be able to get around the insulation; and there was some chance they'd be able to spot something. If they found it, it was somewhat likely they could get it out. Or not. Then we'd have anywhere from one to several open holes in our wall, which we'd have to fix ourselves. In the meantime, a toddler with free access to the inside of the wall. I could picture Monkey chewing on fistfuls of insulation while the house smelled EVEN WORSE because of the holes.

So the other option: hold our breath (literally), and wait. Ugh, ugh, ugh. We had to move dinner with friends elsewhere one night; opened the windows when we could, and left the house as often as possible when we couldn't. We have endured the sickly sweet smell of plug-in air fresheners turned all the way up to full blast, and the awful funk during showers and while brushing our teeth. I found myself dreaming that the rats were taking revenge, nibbling my extremities while I slept.

Thankfully, after two weeks, the smell has mostly faded. The pest control company is coming tomorrow to seal off all the entry points and set traps for anyone who wasn't frightened off by the smell of their compatriots rotting in the walls. Needless to say, all this smelly drama has left me with little inspiration to blog. If I had been posting, the last 14 blogs would have been titled "My House Still Stinks - What's Up With You?"

The other (better) reason for my absence from cyberspace is that I've been writing like a fiend on that novel I mentioned to y'all last month. There's definitely a learning curve, but I feel I'm scaling it, slowly. I haven't decided yet if the rats will get a cameo in the book, but I'll keep you posted.