Mice

First, happy birthday to Jeff! We had a super low-key celebration involving going out for breakfast, and cupcakes in the afternoon. Maren wanted to help blow out the candles. 

Maren very sweetly spent $2.75 of her own money to buy a present - sidewalk chalk, which is definitely out of season, but Jeff and Maren went out and used it on our sidewalk anyway, with the effect of producing very cold hands. 

The not fun news of the weekend is that we have a mouse problem. And by problem, I mean a dead mouse somewhere in the walls or insulation or vents or some other hiding place in our basement furnace room. Which means that every time the heat comes on, it blows the smell of dead mouse throughout the house. Nowhere is safe. 

We know (or are at least pretty sure) it is a mouse because we have an infestation. We have caught 9 mice as of last time Jeff checked the traps. I can’t really do much because the diseases spread by mice are dangerous for developing fetuses, and not worth the risk. At least the mice are now confined to certain areas of the basement - they were elsewhere in the house, and we found and blocked the access points we could figure out. We thought maybe they had moved out, but then the smell started and we inspected the basement more carefully. 

We called one mouse control company and they were kind of useless, so I will be calling someone else tomorrow. But we don’t know what to do about the smell. It is terrible. We might have to have someone come in and basically tear apart the walls. At least it’s just in a mostly unfinished area. 

But here is something funny I discovered just before Maren’s bedtime:

It might just be me, but I think it looks like the doll is viciously attacking the skeleton, maybe sucking blood from its neck. Not totally sure how this scene came to be, but I do know that earlier the skeleton was the doll’s big sister, and they were travelling by train together.