rats

At 3am the fire alarm went off. Not the fire alarm that tells you that there’s smoke, it’s the fire alarm that randomly beeps to remind you that your security system blows, and you should fire them soon. I ran around naked (yes I’m a naked sleeper) trying to figure out where the high pitched beeping was coming from and found that it was a hallway sensor.

I jumped to try and press the reset button. My breasts landed on my belly a few seconds after my feet returned to the floor. The alarm was still beeping. The kids were sound asleep.

Ever resourceful, I went into Jane’s room to get a chair to stand on. I rolled her desk chair to the hallway, still half asleep, and stood on it to turn off the incessant fire alarm. Of course the chair was on rollers, so I ended up naked, insulted and on the hallway floor.

My third attempt was successful, and by that time I was wide awake.

It took me approximately 45 minutes to fall back asleep, which is a shame because an earthquake woke me up at 4am. Maybe it’s not a faulty fire alarm, maybe it’s an earthquake detector. The earthquake was a small one, 4.4 on the Richter scale, and it moved north and south. It was like being rocked to sleep, except my husband is out of town, so I had to check on the kids. Alexander was snoring, Jane was a little bit awake and went right back to sleep after I checked in with her.

I went back to sleep by 4.30 and was up at 7 to get the kids up and ready for school.

Something under the sink smelled bad, rotten. I looked, and then I looked again, and I found this.

Yep, remember the rat? Gotcha!

Well, you might remember that yesterday was an 85 plus degree day. Um, the rat wasn’t fat, he was hot and bloated.

With a dead animal in the house and a husband out of town, I did what every Mommy Blogger worth her salt does. I started knocking on the neighbor’s doors.

I have the world’s best neighbor. Jerry came over with a shovel and scraped the hot rat out of my house. Well, most of it. After we both hyperventilated a little at the disgustingness of said rat, Jerry told me how to clean the area. You see, Jerry is a firefighter. After scraping decomposed rat from my kitchen, he ran to his truck and gave me face masks that are “filters appropriate for a WMD invasion”.  I ran to the market to buy bleach, gloves and a spray-bottle. I cleaned the pieces of tail and hunks of rat fur that were left behind.

I missed a morning Pho with my friend, and I need to tell you something that you will find remarkable. None of this was the worst part of my day.

I had a perfectly lovely rest of the day. A quick trip to the gym, pho with Lolita, I cleaned the house and did a few errands, and then I went to pick the kids up from school.

When I got there my dear friend Katherine was with her daughter, and as I asked her about carpooling on Thursday she turned to me with tears streaming down her cheeks. “We’re moving back to Australia.” she said.

And we stood there crying and hugging and sometimes kissing. Because I love their kids, and they love ours. Because their family has become like family for us, and my son. My son is crushed. The boys have been friends since their first day of kindergarten, four years ago. The girls are close, and they will miss each other too. I need my friends, and these are good friends.

So the day? Well? It’s a horrible day. There was a moment of sunshine in the middle, but basically it sucked.