Seriously Sucky Monday

So last night around 2:30 in the morning, Chris and I wore woken (awoken?) by a "bump in the night". We both listened and then heard the plink of the piano. Just one solitary note. If we hadn't BOTH heard it, I'm pretty sure we would've thought we'd imagined it. I said, "Camden must be sleepwalking again, go check" (because you know women have to birth the babies, men have to investigate noises in the dark). Chris headed out to our hallway and peered over to Camden's room, but his door was still shut. He looked over the railing, downstairs, concerned that he didn't have some kind of weapon to take with him. (Note to self: we should get some kind of weapon up here). He stood at the top of the stairs for a while, listening...said then he thought he heard something in the garage. He finally went downstairs to go investigate, grabbed a candlestick holder off the piano (made of plastic, but he didn't know that at the time), looked in closets, in each room downstairs, and finally in the garage. But nothing out of the ordinary. The entire time I was sitting anxiously in my bed, hand on the phone, ready to call 911. He came back to bed, and we chalked it up to ghosts (yes, we watched too much American Horror Story). Or, you know maybe the wind somehow caused one of the piano books to fall on the piano keys.

If only we were so lucky. No, we had houseguests. And not the kind that we invited, and looked forward to serving brunch to the next morning. The big fat hairy black kind.

So this morning Chris comes upstairs after working out,  and says, "Rachel, I need to talk to you about something, away from the kids", He looked pretty serious, I'm imagining the worst, so I left Camden snoring sleeping in my bed and followed Chris into our bathroom and he says, "So I just saw a huge black rat in our garage, it jumped from the shelving up to the ductwork and into a hole in the ceiling. Oh, and there are rat turds all over downstairs" (I used those quotes loosely, I don't think he actually said turds).

Apparently I was NOT imagining the worst.

You should have seen my mouth. Hit the floor.

Seriously. I am NOT a terrible housekeeper. I should NOT have rats IN MY FRICKING HOUSE.

I called the exterminator first thing in the morning, and they came out within a couple hours. They said it would cost $300 for the initial inspection and 3 follow up visits to empty the traps. (They could have told me it would cost $1,000...I would have paid it). I understand how rodents can get in the garage, or in the crawlspace...I just wanted to know how they were getting INSIDE MY HOUSE! So the pest guy said that ours was getting in (and out) under the door between the garage and the mudroom. You couldn't really SEE a hole there, but the weatherstripping was worn down so that you could shove a pen through the corner. The guy told me that they only have to be able to fit their jaw through and the rest just follows. Excuse me while I go vomit.

Speaking of vomit, I spent all day not knowing whether I should cry, or vomit, or both. I am emotionally exhausted. And I have a horrible headache. I blame it all on that damn rat. In other news, I swept and vacuumed the hell out of these floors today, so that if there's even a speck of shit anything on them I am going to see it.

So anyway, in addition to cleaning the floors today, I replaced the weather stripping on the mudroom door and it is so snug that we can barely even close the door all the way, so ain't nothin' gettin' through that. We've got traps all over the place...3 IN the house which sure as hell better not catch anything now that I've got my new and improved weather stripping up, 3 or 4 in the garage...those are the ones I'm gonna be Chris is going to be checking, and some in our crawl space (underneath the house). There are some issues in our foundation vents where we need to replace the screens, and some gaps in the garage door that we need to patch...but seriously at this point (as in today), I am concerned with keeping them OUT of my house.

So that was my day. It sucked. I guess if I have to be thankful for something it would be that I'm thankful there wasn't a human breaking into our house to kill us after he played a little minuet. But I think I totally would have preferred the ghosts over the rodent.