We got home from our trip last night with only 2 throwing up episodes.  The trip was fairly uneventful given the stomach virus we have circulating.

We turned on the water heater, unloaded the car, fed the non-sickies dinner and relaxed for a few hours.  At bedtime I took a long hot shower and crawled into my inviting, comfortable bed for a night of peaceful rest.

And…. action!

• 11:30 pm – Can’t fall asleep. This is crazy. What is it about sleeplessness lately? 
• 12:30 pm – Finally fell asleep but have to get up again to go pee because pregnancy is awesome like that.
• 1 am – Must be asleep.  Have dream that neighbor’s put in a big water park in their backyard.  It’s not the safe kind. Everybody is in danger and nobody is listening to me.  They say I’m overreacting about there being no sides on the 30 foot high water slide.
• 2 am – I have to pee again. And I’m disturbed by my dream.
• 3 am– Somebody’s house alarm goes off.  This is not a silent alarm.  It freaks Jesse out.  The boy is 22 months old.  It’s not like I can explain the sound to him.
• 4 am – Alarm is off.  I’m working on getting Jesse back to sleep.  His sippy cup starts making soft squealing air noises.  He doesn’t realize this is his cup and he’s worried. I pry the cup from his hands.  He doesn’t like this. 
• 4:10 am – Big dog does something on the carpet that I’m not going to talk about.  This is very unusual for him, but that doesn’t matter to me in this moment.  I had to shampoo the carpet at 4 in the morning.  This scares Jesse even more.  Ryan stays awake to take care of him while I work on the mess.  Ryan has a big test today.  I feel bad.
• 4:30 am – Jesse is wide awake and now talking about everything. I move to the living room with him to keep from waking Ryan up again. I make Jesse lay on the couch while I read my book.
• 4:45 am – Another kid wakes up vomiting. This kid is older and is kindly taking care of himself.  Hurray for children who actually get it that vomit goes in the toilet. However, said kid isn’t throwing up quietly.  Ryan wakes up again.  Asks what’s going on.
• 5:15 am  – Jesse finally falls asleep and I lay down beside him and get a little shut eye, too.
  [bliss]
• 7 am – A kid wakes up and comes into the living room where I lay with Jesse.  His face is bright and he’s ready for the day.  I say, “Take care of Jesse when he wakes up.  I’m going to bed.” 
  I sleep till 10.

We opted to take this day off from school.  I’ve left the water heater on.  The sick kid from last night is feeling much better.

I still have two kids to go.  Kait said her stomach was turning a lot last night and she thinks she got through the bug without actually getting sick because of all the garlic cloves she’s been swallowing.  So maybe I only have one kid left who hasn’t gotten it yet.  He’s 5 and he may or may not make it to the toilet. 
And then there is always hope he won’t get it at all.

But, like I said, it just doesn’t get boring around here.

I’m so angry with my dog.

My boys came inside to get Kait.  There was panic in their voices – my 5 year old was not understandable.

Apparently there was something such and such all over the place and it was really bad and she really needed to come out and look.
Never mind that mama, that’s me, was standing right there.  It wasn’t me they wanted.  It was her.

They know me way too well.

She went out, then came back, grabbed her camera, and went back out again.

When she came back in we found ourselves needing to do a little spontaneous homeschooling.  We did a little research on the difference between carpenter ants and termites.

These carpenter ants are covering the back corner of the house.  Covering it.  Thousands of them. They are inside and outside the attic and the wall.  They are falling off onto the kids’ heads.

Dear Mrs. Landlord lady,
It’s us again.  Your favorite tenants.  We have a bug problem…

I’ve been having trouble with words lately.

Pronouncing them.
Recalling definitions.
Spelling them.
Speaking them in a manner that makes sense.

It’s kind of annoying.

Yesterday a friend pointed me towards a blog that I have found to be hilarious.  It’s called Hyperbole and a half. 
It’s seriously funny.

So I told my husband about it.  He visited it and laughed his butt off, and then we kept repeating things randomly like, “I made food!  I’m Magical!” and “Eeeeee”.

Yes.  It was that funny.

So, later on a quick run to the grocery store I mentioned the blog again, for what reason I can’t recall, but I called it Hyper Bowl and a Half, just like I had all day.  He’s heard me, but chose this particular moment to say,

You know the word is pronounced hahy-pur-buh-lee, right?

Duu. Duh, I meant.

I knew that.  I swear I totally knew that.  But my brain has this short circuit thing going on and it’s making me mad.  Not angry mad, crazy mad.

And through my day of mispronounciation I’ve actually taught my daughter to call it hyper bowl too. 

And they let me homeschool.

Cute right?

But they’re made of elephant poo.
I’m not kidding.

Is there a market for this stuff? Really?
Maybe the tree huggers are crossing the line here.?.
I’m not sayin’.
Just sayin’.

…

Ooohhh, it’s sanitized. Cause, you know, that makes all the difference.
[shakes head in disbelief]

You know, as the mother of a gazillion little boys, I’ve happened to come in contact with more than a small amount poo in my days.

If I’d only known…

Rob, a good friend of ours who also happens to be our pastor and my dear friend, Marty’s husband, told us about this unusual food combination he calls the MAN-d-bar.  I admit to being completely skeptical about his description of it’s tastiness.  I mean, this suggestion comes from a man who eats liver and onions.

On purpose.

[bleck!]

But, we decided to try it anyway.

No, not liver and onions.  That would be dumb. I’m talking about dark chocolate covered bacon.
So dark chocolate covered bacon can now be added to our list of odd things tried. 

My husband and I spent the morning in the kitchen together.  While I did the dishes, he cooked us up our very first batch of dark chocolate covered bacon. 
I heart chocolate.  I heart bacon.  However, it felt weird, and really wrong watching Ryan cover the bacon with melted chocolate.
I felt like he was purposely ruining my two most favorite foods in the world.

It was close to torturous.

If you want to try the Man-d-bar yourself you’ll need a bag of dark melting or candy making chocolate and a package of thick sliced bacon.

1. Cook your bacon and cool it completely
2. Melt your chocolate in a double broiler or in the microwave.  Either way, stir it often to keep it from burning.  Burnt chocolate is really disgusting.
3. Dip your bacon into the melted chocolate and set it aside on a plate or wax paper.
4. Wait for the chocolate to dry completely before trying a piece.  Seriously.  Wait.  You have to wait.

At first I thought the taste was odd.  Not gross, but odd.  However, after I finished the first small piece I had. to. have. more.

Each person in my family agreed.

It is seriously addictive. 
Be sure to, 1. make this on a day you’re not planning on eating anything else for the rest of the day or the next day, or 2. make this on a day when you have the stomach flu so you won’t be tempted to eat the entire batch in one sitting, or 3. have a container out ahead of time so you can put the majority of it away and out of your eyesight before you take your first bite.

Confession: I ate a half a package of thick sliced bacon covered in dark chocolate today.  And I would have eaten the whole thing had my selfish wise husband not put it in a container and hid it from me.

I don’t question for a minute our dear friend and pastor’s care for our spiritual well being.  I do now, however, question his concern for our physical health.

Seriously.  A half a package of bacon.

After finishing up the bunk room I came out and saw this.

Keep in mind, we only have 9 people in our family.  And my cup was still sitting right where I left it on the coffee table.

So how…?

Nevermind.

So, I’m sleeping well, as I ought to be. I’m having dreams nightmares of spiders under my pillow and some obnoxious pitter-patter noise coming the roof area.

Santa?

Then I woke up suddenly and realized one of those two things wasn’t a dream at all.

Up from my bed I sprang to see what was the matter. And to use the bathroom.

And all was silent.
And I said to myself, “Self, everything is fine – you’re just half asleep is all. The noise was just a dream. Stop overreacting, will ya?”

I went back to bed.
Comfortable.

But then…

Holy Crap

It happened again!

Here began my horrible realization that there is something alive running amok in my attic.
Which I guess, when you think about it, is better than something dead running around up there.

By the sounds of it, the amount of noise and the way it’s run sounds, I’m guessing it to be a heavy footed creature the size of Rhode Island that is quite possibly going to fall through the ceiling and squash or attack me in my sleep. But I can’t sleep, so I guess that’s an irrational thought.
I can’t believe I’m the only one in the house torn out of a peaceful sleep by all the shenanigans up there.

So I sit here – now 3:19 am with no other choice but to listen while my new upstairs neighbors break up the normal night silence.
It’s eerie.

I’m no stranger to having critters in the ceiling above me at night. I spent a summer living with the in-laws at the farm while we were house hunting. We shared the finished basement with many field mice who spend their evenings softly scurrying around in the safety of the basement ceiling.

But what’s in our attic right now…
Well, it’s no field mouse – I can say that for sure.

No siree-bob.

I’m thirsty. Hungry. And very, very tired.

And I think our house may be trying to exorcise us.

I opened the back sliding glass door for the dogs this morning and something caught my eye on the lower part of the door frame. Just below, and to my left was a small, round, spiny egg sack in an unorganized spider web.

I knew at first glance exactly what kind of baby spiders were tucked away in that ball. I didn’t even have to examine it, or turn to Google.
And then when I pointed it out to Kait she breathed a sarcastic, “Oh great.”

She knew exactly what it was, too.

This is the egg sack of a brown widow spider. 

Kait and I were the only ones who knew exactly what spider sack that was, which is odd because we’re the only gals in the family. However, Kait is the only one old enough to clearly remember our brown widow infestation when we lived in SC about 7 or 8 years ago. The little suckers were all over our enclosed back porch, in the kids toys, in high corners… We thought they were black widows at the time because the variety we had invading us was very dark in color and I had never before heard of a brown widow. We learned a lot about brown widows at that time.

And now I can spot and identify their egg sacks with a quickness.

It took us a little bit to find her,but I knew we had to for safety reasons.  My kids walk through this door a thousand times a day.  And after a bit of searching, Joe spotted her balled up in the corner of the door frame. Kait took pictures of her then she and Joe caught the big mama and put her in a jar. Actually, Joe fetched the jar and Kait wrangled the spider into it with a very short stick while I stood about 10 feet away and repeated, “Don’t get bit. Just Don’t get bit. Watch out!  Oh, dear God…  I don’t want to spend my weekend in the ER.”

The differences in the brown and black widow are pretty clear.  The black widow is a shiny black with a very red, pronounced hour glass on her front side.
The brown widow can range anywhere from almost white to almost black.  She has a more orange colored hour glass – which we saw clearly but weren’t able to get good pictures of, and has dark bands around her legs.  Ours even has pretty markings on the back of her abdomen.

Did I just say a spider was pretty?

I actually felt bad about the idea of bugging her.  Having 6 boys and a nature loving daughter is really messing with my head.

So, we now have a poisonous spider in a jar, along with her egg sack.  And her name is Roxanne.

Yes, they named her.

Something seems very wrong with this.

At least I got them to move the jar off of my kitchen table.  Roxy has been banished, jar and all, to the out-of-doors.

This isn’t one of those indoor type pets, if you know what I mean.

Found this on After The Handbasket.

My husband got home from work very late last night.  He parked his motorcycle, took off his helmet and other riding gear, and grabbed his stuff out of his saddle bags.  Then he hit the button to close the garage door and came inside.  Very normal.

It was the awful, metal crunching noise that followed that routine that was not normal.  I was sure one of our vehicles was being squashed somehow.  Did he not pull his bike in all the way?  Did I park the van too close to the door?

this is going to cost a lot of money…

As it turned out, our garage door was actually eating itself, and, thankfully, not one of our vehicles.

After a bit of inspection, my husband found that a hinge had broken on one side of the door making it impossible for the garage door to close more than half way, and because of that some bolts on the top of the door stripped out and pulled the other half of the door way out of position.

Then, in confused desparation, it wouldn’t stop trying to open and close itself, just compounding the situation.

I was hollaring at it, “Stop! Stop!” while Ryan was hollaring at me, “Stop, Stop!”

I  have no creative words to describe what the scene looked like – but the noise that woke up half our city last night sounded like a giant metal monster eating a little community of smaller, screaming metal monsters.

Have I told you before that this house is quirky?

There was a possibility that we might go to visit my sister, brother, and mother in SC today and tomorrow, depending on Ryan’s work schedule.

It appears that won’t be happening now.  The garage door is half open, falling freely on one side where the hinges are broken and the rollers are no longer in the track, and it’s stuck in that position.   Ryan put something under the falling side so it wouldn’t continue to fall and possibly injure somebody or something.

We’ll call our landlord today – but, although an extremely nice lady, we already know how slow the repair will be.  When our sink fell out it took almost a week to fix it.  When the washer flooded our house it took a week before they sent somebody to clean the carpets (oh the stench!).  And they never fixed our fridge.  After 3 weeks of fighting with it to keep our food cold my husband purchased the $130 part and fixed it himself.  That was over a month ago and we still haven’t seen the refund.

What an interesting life I’m living lately.  I really should be taking more pictures.

I’m content in all this.  But I still can’t help but think, “What next?”