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.

Cobwebs and My Addled Brain (Unrelated, Mostly)

First, I have had the heebie-jeebies all day [that's right, I said heebie-jeebies] after a trip to our basement laundry area this morning. I have noticed in the last few days that the cobwebs have gathered amazingly fast on our new washing machine and hot water heater, both of which were installed within the last two weeks. This morning I went down to find teeny little strands attached to almost everything, including our hanging clothes from earlier in the week.

I grabbed a duster and went to work. Then I noticed that under the light fixture, there were tons of dust particles lingering in midair. Weird. So I looked closer, and, yep -- those were itty bitty spiders. There had to be at least 30 of them, hanging over my head by almost imperceptible single strands from the fluorescent light bulbs. After spraying them down with my trusty Citrus Magic (sorry PETA, I'm a peaceful person and animal lover, but spiders in the house incur my wrath), I moved the clothes and went back upstairs. Ugh.

Wait.... was that a spider on my shoulder? Do I feel something crawling on my foot? Is my back always this itchy in the morning? Now there is definitely something in my hair.... All morning I was scratching and searching, battling phantom spiders everywhere in my clothes, on my skin, in my hair.

Once the ick factor wore off a bit, I started wondering about cobwebs, which I have always assumed were just collections of dust that had somehow formed a sticky line. I guess I thought it was static electricity or something. But I did a little research (esoteric code for Googling 'what is a cobweb'), and learned that cobwebs actually are spiderwebs that have been abandoned.

So the little guys start a web and get interrupted, or they make a web and it turns out not to be ideal hunting ground, etc. So they head out, leaving the sticky little strands behind to attract dust and conjure up spooky visions of Miss Habersham's wedding cake. What? Just me? Fine.

There's probably some interesting metaphor in there somewhere. Hmm.... Nope. I've got nothing.

That's a perfect segue to my brain issues. I love, love, love having my sweet baby boy around (and with me so often) and I can't express the joy he's brought to my life. But his impact on my cognitive abilities -- well, it isn't pretty. My memory, already lousy, is so much worse than ever. I forget birthdays and phone numbers that I never thought would slip out of my awareness and I forget to do basic stuff sometimes like locking the front door and paying rent at my office.

The distraction factor is huge, too. Today I had lunch with one of my favorite people (with MLM tagging along) and as we said goodbye I thought of several little things I wanted to ask him.... nothing major, just simple follow-up questions and bits of conversation that got lost when I was checking someone's mouth for pieces of chewed-up crayon or distracted by what could've been a choking-on-apple noise. We still enjoy our time together, I know, and it doesn't weaken our friendship. But I do have hazy memories of our long, intellectual conversations tucked into a booth at an Oxford pub, and I sort of long for the days when I could hold onto a topic long enough to cover it deeply.

Even when Little Man isn't at the table, the many tasks and duties of motherhood seem to be a constant soundtrack in the background of my brain, keeping me from focusing completely on whatever is in front of me. Part of it is the move, of course, and my mental acumen will stabilize as life becomes more normal. And whatever I have lost in the process of having a baby and raising a toddler is 100% worth it.

Still, it would be nice to be able to clear out the cobwebs -- literally and figuratively!