How to wreck your Sunday - shower in rat droppings.

Today was looking to be gloriously productive. Toddler napping, 11yo about to go to his friend's for a swim, me about to sit down and fill out my PhD application in the peace and quiet.

Only, when I reached up to the tippety-top of our one cupboard to retrieve the swimming gear that had been lying dormant since last season I was treated to an avalanche of something I thought were little black beads. In my face, in my hair, down my shirt. I vaguely wondered why I'd stored craft stuff up there instead of with the crafty stuff and took a closer look. Rat droppings. There must have been thousands. There are no words for how ill I felt. I'd literally been dumped on. 11yo thought it was hilarious of course. As usual Mummy is glad to be of comic service - not. *grump*

I've known that we've had vermin for a while. They sneak into the kitchen and eat left over dog food, provide snuffly chasey entertainment for the dog at night and we hear them chasing each other in the roof and walls. But since they were not actually interfering with anything of ours, e.g. food. I have left them alone. (My husband sees this as 100% my problem just in case any of you were wondering...) But now that they are nesting in the linen cupboard and have chosen the crib cover I made for 2yo for a nest, chewing up the cot sheet that both 11yo and 2yo used as babies to line said nest, they have got to go. Nice Mummy has just been replaced by a rattucidal killing machine. Only...

I have a problem with killing rats. Not mice, or cockroaches, or venomous spiders, just rats. When we had our mouse invasion during the drought and they were eating anything not sealed in metal or glass I was happy to kill the little fuckers. It was a them or us thing. They contaminated our food supply, catching and relocating was not an option, therefore they had to die. It was during my mouse killing spree I found that poison was not a viable solution for us as they crawl away to die where you can't find them, produce unsavoury smells, and breed flies. So, I used traps, and when the traps didn't kill them I drowned them.

The trouble with using this method for rats, is that traps don't always kill them first go and then you are responsible for hours of suffering until you come along and finish the job. And rats, in the degrees of sentience scale, are way more sentient than mice. Rats can count to five, they are social creatures who pass on knowledge inter-generationally. They have been known to demonstrate emotional attachment. Leaving a creature like that in a trap for hours might just be beyond me :-(

But then again, maybe I should just remember how it felt to be dumped on by several generations of ratties before I get too sentimental. That and the fact that I now have to wash the entire contents of my linen cupboard and line the thing with steel wool wherever they are getting in.

So much for PhD application! Grrrr! Ah! Now I've found the anger. Off to Traps-R-Us for a little retail therapy....

From the 11yo yesterday:

About toy weapons that are not sharp enough to be dangerous:

"Mum, if I'm going to have to use my imagination with these things I need a bit of realism."

Nostalgia:

"Do you remember back when we could have water pistols?"

That last one made me a bit sad. Highlights of my childhood include running under the sprinkler on hot days. On especially good days there'd be a big gang of kids with water pistols and water bombs. My children of the drought have been denied the simple pleasure of blasting away at each other with drinking water. Last year, we experienced the equivalent of a Brisbane summer storm during a BBQ with family friends at our house. You should have seen the kiddies, they were so excited! We laughed at them and teased them: "You'd think you'd never seen rain before!" It turns out they hadn't. Not like that anyway.

Then again, when I was a kid computer games were pixelated bleeps and CGI wasn't. You can't have everything.

Things to be thankful for today:

Husbands who give you shoulder rubs.

Mother-in-laws who manage to cook you up some risotto for dinner while baby-sitting a two year old all day.

Radio stations that play "My Sherona" at exactly the right moment in peak hour traffic.

Antics from 11yo during the hospital visit ensuring that my mother fell asleep smiling.

Nice bosses who give you a heads up before your tiny lab is inundated with strange onlookers.

Flowers on your doorstep.

Cards in your letterbox.

Toddler evening naps so that I can have a quiet cup of tea, read the latest on the Decriminalisation of Abortion debate and blog.