Boyd Bear Tracks

I don't know what happened, but all of a sudden every creature on the planet seems to be coming out of the woodwork! In my last blog update I mentioned our problem with mosquitos (which hasn't been solved yet), but I forgot to mention that there was a plague of cockroaches too. BIG ones! I got some poison to spray around that supposedly kills them when you spray it and keeps acting so it keeps killing them. I guess it worked because every morning I would find three or four dead ones to sweep up. Occasionally there would be one flying around the living room (yes, they fly!). I thought I had gotten rid of them since I hadn't seen any in a while, but they're starting to show up again.

They don't scare me, though, because I have just relabeled them "water bugs" since they come up out of the drains :-). When I was young and we went to hot country I used to wait by the manholes with my flip flop ready in my hand and every time one came out -- BAM -- I would smack it. They made a pretty cool popping sound! So, I've just been choosing to have joy and consider them my home-made firecrackers :-)!

Then, yesterday as I went out to let the dog in, I saw something lying by the washer. It was a dying mouse. It wasn't moving much but it was still alive. It almost seemed like a baby mouse (not quite full grown). I picked it up with a glove and didn't really know what to do with it. Jon wouldn't let me keep it :-(. Everyone else wanted to kill it, but I just couldn't speed the process. I took it out to an empty lot and put it by a tree (I felt just like this when I brought home a sick squirrel in Kindergarten--I didn't get to keep that one either!).

Last night Jon saw another mouse run into the kids' room. I think they're living in the closet in there. It definitely smells like mouse. I think Jon is going to get traps today. I'm just going to have to not be informed of the "catches" he gets with those traps. But, on the positive side, if traps don't solve the problem I may get another cat (so far, Jon has said we're never having another cat :-)).

So to sum up our (some of them unwanted) menagerie: Mosquitoes, Gnats, Cockroaches, Mice, Geckos, Flies, Lizards, Some other wierd flying bugs, Centipedes, and Boomer :-)

On Saturday we colored eggs with Santiago and Lina. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any white eggs. We just had to use brown ones. It made it kind of interesting because if you wanted a green egg you had to use blue (for a short amount of time or it would turn a mucky blue). The colors are quite dark instead of the usual pastels. The kids are excited about having "their own eggs" they can eat :-). Marcos didn't participate. He just watched (I made some for him, but he doesn't like hardboiled eggs).