Plagues of Moses

Building a house is hard work and very taxing emotionally.  My poor husband works very long and strenuous days only to leave work and go put in another 6 hours until midnight plus at our house doing labor intensive jobs.  In the meantime, I have been the mom to five kids trying to be a "single" mother as best as I can while figuring out how to help and support the husband in his work at the new house.  At times I have been tempted to just give up and offer to buy the rental house that we are living in, because I just miss my husband so much and can't fathom another move.  However, whenever this thought enters our brains, Heavenly Father sends us a plague to prod us along and keep us going.

The most recent plague has been the plague of the mice.  It started on Halloween.  I opened the dishwasher to get a dish out and IN the dishwasher I saw a mouse licking a dish, as soon as I spotted it, I slammed the dishwasher shut, thinking that I had trapped it until I could get my bearings and could get something to catch it with.  However when I opened the dishwasher again, it was gone.  We told Zac about it and he came home and ripped apart the dishwasher.  He found that the mouse had chewed a hole in a vent in the dishwasher and was coming in whenever the dishwasher wasn't running, to eat the food off anything that didn't get rinsed well.  The worst part of this was that I had noticed a lot of little brown balls in the dishwasher for days leading up to the discovery, and thought they were crumbs that hadn't washed down.  Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine a mouse might be living there.  After Zac plugged the holes, the mouse had no where to go and in the morning it scurried across our kitchen and went on a wild chase through the living room until Zac chased it out the door.  End of mouse?  Not quite.

Weeks later, Zac was snoring so I made an excursion downstairs to sleep in the boys room, which they don't use because they all pile in with Ashlyn.  I flipped on the light when I entered the room and locked eyes with another little rodent.  You can bet I didn't sleep downstairs that night.  The next day, I bought a bunch of traps and placed them in various locations downstairs.  I would go down to check them daily and started to notice that the peanut butter had been licked off.  Grrr...  So I wedged some cheese on there pretty good and the next thing I know, the little bugger(s) had not only gotten the cheese and the peanut butter, but had pulled the trap under a shelving unit to eat in privacy.  So I went to the grocery store and bought some more sensitive traps.  Success.... and I have been pretty much been pulling mice out daily since, I lost track once we hit 10+!

Some of the other plagues that we have dealt with are:

The Microwave:  about 1 in every 5 times that we use the microwave here, it knocks out power to half the house.  Unfortunately the breaker is outside in the backyard, so to flip the power back on, I have to get on the snow boots and hike through the snow (often in the dark) to flip the power back on.

The Toilet:  We have two bathrooms.  The kids will only use one of them because they have spotted spiders (hobos) in the bathroom downstairs.  The bathroom upstairs has a very little counter top and with 7 of us using this as our main bathroom, many many things get put on the counter top and knocked into the toilet.  When we first moved in here, Ian knocked my deodorant in and then tried to flush it down because he didn't want to reach in and get it out.  It of course got good and stuck and Zac had to rip apart pipes and use his blow torch to get it out.  Since then some of the things I know have gone in are, Zac knocked in my watch the day Ian had stomach flu, and just today Charlotte knocked in Zac's hairbrush after she had done her business (shhhh, don't tell Zac).  And who knows what else has been knocked in that the kids didn't tell us.

The Plague of Water:  There has been a stand built for the washer and dryer in this house, which would be great if we had a front load washer, but we don't.  Therefore, to do my laundry I have to climb up a step stool to reach the top of the washer.  When we first hooked up our hose, it didn't fit right because of the set-up and when I ran the first batch of laundry, the hose came undone and flooded the kitchen and laundry room.  We got that fixed, but we have also had to deal with water whenever it rains and the roof leaks in the bathroom.  If water gets on the floor in the upstairs bathroom, it also leaks down into the downstairs bathroom.  Also, to go with our plague of water, during the summer, when we were using the hoses outside, the spigot  on the side of the house was leaky and apparently ran water down the walls of the house and into the basement, eventually causing mold to grow.  Zac had to tear apart some walls to clean the mold out and had to buy a new spigot to replace the leaky one.

Wind:  The first week we were here, we had a lovely windstorm that ripped the glass screen door off the front door and flung it across the yard.

The Psycho Oven:  One day I cooked us some lovely dinner in the oven.  I shut the oven off when I was done and we sat down to eat.  Soon the oven starts beeping and saying 500 degrees.  I wonder what the heck and then shut it off.  However, it keeps turning itself back on and getting incredibly hot like +500 degrees.  I couldn't shut it off. and it ignited my tin foil lining on fire.  I had to find the breaker to shut it off outside and left it off until I could call the landlord.  The landlord takes days to come and fix it and then can't figure it out.  Zac finally gets some time to look at it and with his special Zac magical powers figures out how to fix it.  Phew.

The Over-Productive Apple Tree: I think my kids would argue that this was a plague that cursed them sorely.  There is an apple tree in our back yard that has not been taken care of and has gone quite wild, producing litterally thousands of apples, most of them inedible.  All summer long the kids had to take turns gathering apples (often rotten), filling our garbage dumpster.  The black garbage can would get quite hot and would ferment the apples so that whenever anyone opened the can, we would all about pass out with alcohol fumes!

Flag on the Mailbox: I know, it sounds like I am getting quite nit picky and whiny now, but even the stupid flag on the mailbox is broken.  I keep thinking I have it fixed and have it up when we have mail ready to go, and then the stupid thing will fall down before the mailman gets here and they don't take our mail.  Boo!

With all these plagues, I am finally ready to say, "Let my people go!"

But honestly, we have actually quite enjoyed Shelley, and feel lucky to find a house big enough to accommodate our large family.  There are many nice things about this house too.

And with that segue, (I am using that as an excuse to post some random pictures that I haven't had a specific blog post for)...

Here are some pictures of us enjoying our time in the rental.

Bronson LOVES balls of any kind and enjoys playing in his room.

He has a fascination with his tongue lately and it is always hanging out.

When I was looking for mice, I found this unicorn costume in our storage room, and Charlotte has been a unicorn ever since.

It is hard to convince her to take it off when we need to go get groceries.  Sometimes, I just have to say "Oh Well" and I take the unicorn to town.

Mom's good helpers

Charlotte playing in Bronson's Hop 'n Pop

A little help here?

My handsome boys!

And that right there is what matters.  We could live anywhere in the world good or bad, big or small, old or new, and as long as we had our wonderful family with us, we would be happy.  We are truly blessed!