Animals

A picture of Benson taking a nap in his future baby brother's crib. This baby isn't getting very many new clothes, but at least he got new crib bedding right? Benson is very very excited about this baby coming, although I think if he knew how much it is going to mess with our "carefree go swimming and to the park everyday" life, I think his excitement would fade slightly.

So, you will have to excuse the pictures in this post. My camera is still out of commission and the Blackberry is perfect in practically every way, except for taking pictures. Anyway, I am going to talk about our recent animal encounters in this house, which unfortunately are more than I would like as I am not crazy about animals. Although I like the two pictured below.

Griffin is currently a talking monkey. A few months ago someone asked me if they fought a lot and I couldn't even really recall a time that they did. Well apparently it is difficult to fight and have disagreements when one party speaks another language. Now that they both speak English, we have some serious YES! NO! YES! NO! YES! NO! fighting going on. I think Griffin is just trying to get Benson back for all the years of bossing him around and disagrees with him just for kicks. It was funny at first, but the humor is fading . . . fast.

Animal Encounter #2 . . . Whale.

Benson took that last picture, I have got some serious belly going on. We are at about 34 weeks and ready to be done. And I promised I would document this pregnancy, so here I am in all my whale glory (standing in a very messy bathroom).

Animal Encounter #3 *Warning* this story will give you nightmares and the shivers.

Last week I sat downstairs by myself to watch some DVR'd television, as I have contractions every night for several hours and was hoping something could make me laugh and forget I wanted to die. As I watched Oprah I began hearing scratching on the window. I kept pausing my show to make sure I wasn't dreaming. I thought perhaps some kids were pranking us. I went upstairs and looked outside. Nothing. Came back downstairs to louder, more consistent scratching. I then remembered that we had a new neighbor who had recently lost a turtle and I figured the poor little guy fell down our window well. I went into our guest room and sure enough could see some little claws scratching the window. You can imagine my surprise when I used a flashlight and found this:

I screamed. I shivered. I may or may not have cried. This picture does not even begin to do justice to the giant sized sewer rat that was stuck in my window well. Even as I type about it, I want to cry. I ran upstairs to my sleeping husband to explain that there was a housecat in our window, although it wasn't really a housecat, but a rat about that size (a cat would have been just as bad to Keith). Now, I have said many times that I am married to Superman or Hercules (seriously, read my profile), but apparently Superman is terrified of rodents. He screamed like a little girl when he saw what I saw. I guess he didn't believe me?!

After googling and fretting over what to do, we decided to call the local police dispatch and explain that a rat on steroids was in our window well. The lady spit out whatever she was drinking when I told her and sent a policeman right over. When the policeman arrived he also screamed like a girl and then proceeded to call his policeman buddy to witness the rodent who clued us in that this was a muskrat. We live by a lake, so I guess this makes sense. Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum than discussed ridiculous ways in which they could dispose of the little guy. Soon they were on the phone with their supervisor and convinced him that action must be taken now because no one in their right mind would go to bed if they knew this guy was outside. Before we knew it, Policeman #3 was at our house. He did not scream like a little girl. Instead, like RoboCop, he went to his car and pulled out a three foot long assault rifle, jumped down into the window well and shot Mr. Rat in the head. Apparently rats are like chickens (aka, run around without heads) and RoboCop had to stomp on the body to keep it from running around. TMI? So sorry. Then they asked for an old towel so our friend could get a proper burial (aka chucked into some one's garbage, because conveniently we all had our black beauties parked outside).

The End (of Mr. Muskrat) anyway.
I sincerely hope you didn't read this right before going to bed. If so, I hope you aren't up for several hours afterward (like Keith and I).

Let's hope my next post is about a new baby, or at least the new baby's nursery progress (his room is getting new carpet this week)!