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.

Very October

This last week we have had some very nice fall weather, and I feel like we have been doing very fall things. Jeff has been putting up Halloween decorations outside, raking leaves, and we have been going for fall walks.

Yesterday was an especially October day with a trip to the pumpkin patch and stopping for cookies and hot chocolate at a little café on the way home.

Trip to the pumpkin patch:

Playing trick-or-treating (blurry hand is knocking on the door):

Maren is super excited for Halloween, and this morning was trying to negotiate how many days away it is. I told her it is 10 days away and she was trying to get me down to two days. I don’t think she ever quite understood that I can’t change the flow of time. 

Dress up

Maren likes playing dress-up these days. Fairly frequently, she wants to put on her “tutu dragon” outfit and dance to music.

The wings were an early birthday present from my sister and brother-in-law, and she calls them her dragon wings. We got her the tutu at a children’s resale clothing store. The mask came from a birthday party she went to, and she has drawn on it with markers. It makes for a pretty good outfit :-)

We are all pretty excited for Halloween coming up. We were pleasantly surprised last year by how busy our neighbourhood is with kids on Halloween, and while I have fun handing out candy at home, Jeff and Maren will be out trick-or-treating.

But Maren has not yet decided what she wants to be for Halloween. For months she was saying she wanted to be an eggplant, and I actually ordered an eggplant hat off of Etsy to help with her costume. But now she says she wants to be a witch or a bat or a skeleton or a vampire or a banana split. So we aren’t really sure yet.

Jeff’s friend Scott is in town for a conference, and yesterday Jeff and Maren and Scott went to two Halloween stores. Maren tried on a few different costumes:


I don’t think she will wear a mask, but the pictures are pretty hilarious. Apparently they put her in a hockey mask and had her run around the store saying “I’m scary, I’m scary!” I can only imagine.

Happy Thanksgiving!

It is Thanksgiving here in Canada. We have had a lovely three day weekend, though all of us are sick. I got a second cold on top of my first cold, and Jeff and Maren both have the second cold. Maren was least hard-hit, but she hasn’t napped two days in a row, and that has caused a bit of lability. Possibly the cold is part of it as well.

We tried something new for our vegetarian Thanksgiving main dish - mushroom pot pie. It was absolutely a success. Maren didn’t eat it, but she didn’t actually eat any of the food we had prepared. This is normal for her lately, and I hear quite normal for her age. So we had mushroom pot pie, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, baby red potatoes from our garden, and roasted carrots from our garden. It seemed like a relatively simple Thanksgiving dinner, but everything was incredibly satisfying and delicious.

And here is an extra gratuitous Maren picture:

Happy Thanksgiving!

Birthday, deck, sick, garden

Birthday: Maren officially turned 3 years old. We brought oatmeal m&m cookies to daycare, along with the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game that didn’t make it at her party. She had ice cream and presents at home. There were balloons to play with. I think she had a pretty great 3rd birthday. 

Deck: When we bought this house, our deck posed many accessibility challenges. It had four different sections at different levels, no railings or handrails (so getting safely from one area to another required some really careful maneuvering), and cut the yard in two.  This meant that the faucet for the hose and the garden tool shed were separated from the garden and main yard area by the deck, so that it was necessary to go up over the deck and down a handrail-less set of steps and then back again if I wanted to water the garden. So basically totally not functional for me. 

Starting the week of the 17th we had our deck totally redone, and it was finished last Wednesday. We also had a weird section of our fence replaced. The results are amazing. Our deck and yard both feel hugely bigger, because there is so much more usable space. The deck is smaller, but it’s all at one level and there are railings all around, so the entire footprint is usable space, not having to worry about step-down areas or falling off the side. We now have two sets of steps, both with handrails. There is still a lot of work to do to make all of the yard space usable, but just having it all connected as one yard makes it feel about twice as big. And now I can garden independently, which I am pretty thrilled about. 

Sick: I found out on Tuesday that I have iron deficiency, and started supplements on Wednesday. This explains some bouts of extreme fatigue I have been having, and hopefully the problem will resolve quickly. On Wednesday night I started to lose my voice, by Thursday it was pretty bad, and Thursday night I had all kinds of trouble sleeping. Then Friday morning I could barely speak, my throat was extremely sore, and apparently I had also contracted some kind of stomach virus. I was pretty miserable all day Friday, but after a good sleep felt immensely better by Saturday. I still sound bad, but feel almost normal. 

Garden: Saturday morning was for spending in the new backyard. We harvested all the carrots and potatoes from the garden, and Jeff raked leaves. The carrots and potatoes were the only things spared by the rabbit who used our garden as a salad bar, and I was quite happy with our yield, given how neglected the garden was this summer. 

It has been colder than normal, and it was chilly and very fall-like this morning, but sunny and a lovely day to be outside. I am happy to be less sick. Overall, I would say this has been a good week 😊