In the summer, our window wells for the basement get toads. Lots of them. KTDID and X-men helped me remove around two dozen toads of varying sizes from the well last week, so that the framers could carry the lumber for framing the new room in the basement through the window well. Yes, I have grates to keep X-man from falling into the well upstairs. I also have covers to try and keep the toads and mice out, but those little monsters find a way. The mice usually end up dying. The toads appear to thrive.
However, in the winter our house gets mice. It doesn't happen too often. Only when the temps dip below 15 or so, do they dare come inside and take a chance with our mousers (Luke and Maya). They get in somewhere through the basement, but since KTDID lived down there last winter, we didn't get down there much.
When she moved out, we put all of our furniture in the storage room to clean the carpets and start planning on putting a 4th bedroom downstairs. Then we left it alone for a while so we could work on the new flooring upstairs and the gardens. When we went to put everything back, we noticed their messes.
As it turns out, the mice were in the HVAC and storage room last winter. So they ate some things (a spine to my high school yearbook, insulation and lots of cardboard boxes). But they also managed to poop and pee all over a bunch of MacTroll's work electronics and all the boxes that he was (for some reason) saving.
Today, while my Mom was available to sit, MacTroll and I went through all of his cord and box collections, the basement electronics and then all of the other unlabeled boxes in the storeroom. We cleaned up all the stuff with Chlorox wipes and took a trunk full of electronics to the quarterly electronics recycling collection in Champaign, which was a mess! We waited an hour and a half to turn our stuff in. But the nice part was that it was 90 minutes without our child... and there was nothing else for the two of us to do but chit chat, which was really pretty enjoyable.
When we returned home, we continued to scrub, disinfect and vacuum the storage room. Then we headed out to pick up two more sets of metal shelving and some rubbermaid containers. All of the cardboard boxes in the basement are being put out for collection on Monday morning. We also made the decision to trash X-man's crib, as it had a drop side and those have now been banned.
It's now amazingly clean in there. So, I started shifting some things that were in the garage, that should really be kept indoors, into the rubbermaid containers. I labeled them and put them away on the new shelves. I promise that anything over 40 lbs was not lifted by me.
I still have more work to do. I found a box of random files that needed to be shredded from 1999-2001. So I worked on that until I overheated the shredder. :-)
Overall, it was one of the most productive Saturdays in a while because two of us could work together rather than always having one person on child watching duty. But Nana admitted tonight that there would be no way she could keep up with X-man every day. We know we gave birth to the energizer bunny. :-)
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