This is a very appropriate title because that's exactly what I need to do. Several weeks have passed and a few events that I'll be writing about are quite significant and hopefully will never be repeated. Here are a few photos to go along with the stories:
First off-here's Eli holding you know what...a baited mouse trap. Why you ask? Yes, a few weeks ago Heather could swear she saw a little gray critter run behind the dryer in the basement. We all convinced her that she imagined it and I think she even convinced herself and said "I think I saw it..." Well, she wasn't crazy, we started discovering little turds around places in the house: drawers, pantry & cabinets. It was time to pay a visit to Walgreens for a four pack for what you see Eli holding. We decided to lace them with peanut butter and watch the magic happen. Basically once we determined that we did indeed have a mouse, Heather lived on top of the counters and scheduled plenty of running errands away from home so as to not be a part of this...whatsoever. Night fell and Heather did not sleep well at all. We woke up the next morning to...nothing. Dang! I was certain we'd trap one...or more. Then it happened, Heather screamed from the basement: "ewww, there's one in the trap down here". We thought that may be the end of the story until the next morning when Chloe ran downstairs and said: "there's sqeaking in the bathroom cabinet (where I put another trap) and it's scaring me". Great. I went up to find that we'd caught another one (kind of) by it's leg and it was stuck behind the cabinet where I couldn't reach. Long story short-we haven't seen (or heard) any more mice in the house. That was fun...not.
Yeah, Clayton wish he could grow a beard like this but in honor of the Academy Awards, the kids dressed up like certain celebreties. Clayton doesn't usually jump up and down about dressing up but he thought it would be funny to dress up like Joaquin Phoenix when he was interviewed by David Letterman a while back (it's pretty funny if you want to YouTube it).
...and finally, our latest tragedy. A few weeks ago Heather was putting some things away in the big storage closet attached to the preschool when she walked in to about 3 inches of water. Holy crap! Of course this type of thing only happens at about 10:30 at night so what do you do? You call "Danny to the Rescue" (Grandpa Danny that is). We grabbed his shop-vac and just started sucking all of the water up. This was no easy task-First of all, it was only a 16 gallon shop-vac which needed to be dumped about every 2 minutes, second of all-there was a ton of water to get up so it took FOREVER to get up. Once we reached what we thought was the finish line on getting all of the water up...it kept coming through the floor. What the? I was on the phone with "flood control emergency whatever their name was" and was getting nowhere, especially since it happened to be around midnight. We knew we needed to sink a sump pump in the floor but nothing was going to happen until the morning. It boils down to this: it was seriously the longest night of my life. I set my alarm to go off every 45 minutes so I could suck up the water and adjust towels etc all in the name of saving the laminate flooring that was in the preschool. I must have dumped the shop-vac over a hundred times that night. My back still hurts. Heather needed to cancel preschool the following day since we knew we'd be jack hammering the floor in there to put in a sump pump so she emailed all of the moms. A few minutes later one of the moms said "hey, my dad does those all the time, he could come help you!" Within an hour or so, we had 3 guys creating their own earthquake with the jack hammer and installing a new pump that finally stopped the problem. What was the deal with the water coming in? Well, we basically live on top of a river here in Kaysville that will rise quite a bit in the spring. We have never had this problem at this part of the house before(the only place we didn't have a pump) but it happened on a day that had been raining hard all day, then there was snow, then the hot sun came out and melted everything...too quickly. Back to the picture you see above-Liam and Kate were anxious to help me with the floor project. No, after the all-night water dumping party I was having we weren't able to save the floor so we had to tear it out and put in a new one which we did last week.
We are planning on making a road trip to California this weekend which we are all very excited about and are craving the much needed break. Heather and I are nervous that the pump will cease to work. We're thinking of hiring a babysitter for the pump that could just monitor if the dumb thing is working or not. If we come home to water...my house will be up for sale.
