of mice and mucus
One of the many ways that pregnancy reveals itself to be the curse of Eve is that you can't take any drugs while you're pregnant, even garden variety over the counter ones that help you sleep. Which is frustrating because more than a big margarita right now, I would really like to inhale a case of Niquil. I've got some sort of sinus cold from hell (arent they all?) and the doctor-ordered course of treatment is to stick my head over a bowl of steam three times a day. But I can't even make it down the stairs to boil the water. And if I could, I would need to fight off the mice that have taken over our kitchen. How can I bring a child into this mess?
Which brings me to the other overwhelming issue confronting us right now; mice infestation. Once you get a family of mice in your house, do you know how quickly they reproduce? We do! Just fast enough to fill your silverware drawer with poop every day. Yes, it's very unsanitary. For about a month we have been looking the other way and putting off the extermination decision, because I have met several of the mice personally when they get stuck in the recycling drawer and they are darn cute. Like, mind-bogglingly cute. So cute that their dead little souls will invade my dreams if I go about setting traps. But the humane solution is to trap them one at a time in a cage, and then let them go in the woods about a 10-minute walk from our house. Which is not very feasible times 25 mice if I can't even walk down the stairs.
I've been thinking about buying a pet store cage, trapping the mice one by one, caring for them in the cage until we think we've caught the whole nest, and then freeing them all together somewhere far from our house. Do you think wild mice are more feral than pet store mice and will go about tearing each other to bits in their newfound captivity? Because that might be harder to take than the dead ones in the traps.
forward spring
It is spring today, and we celebrated it in style in my classroom. I had the childrens come up with a million different ways to finish a sentence that begins "Spring is...", mostly because I wasn't satisfied when they said "fun" the first seven times; some more explicit instruction was required to pull out the kind of answers I really wanted, like "Spring is beautiful trees and bugs" and "Spring is riding bikes". Then we made posters. Spring is tissue-paper collages, and the watered down glue that holds such collages together is not as difficult to clean up when it spills all over the table (twice! no, three times!) than you might imaging. I did put it in very small cups for a reason.
One problem with the arrival of spring is that I still haven't gotten my seeds in the mail. Everything stands ready for them; well, almost ready. I can't bring myself to finish their enclosure until they're actually in my hot little hands, but it won't take long now! I've even learned something about florescent lights, though perhaps still not enough. But if they don't come soon, there's no chance they'll be ready in time for prime gardening season, and I'll have to end up buying plants again. Like every other year. Boo. Oh well, at least the seed-starting will be good practice, and maybe with careful storage I can try and keep some of the extra seeds until next year.
Everything else seems to be going apace in the garden, without much intervention from us. Crocuses blooming (very small this year, but present), daffodils sprouting very nicely (and nicely increased in number, it looks like!), lilies and irises starting to emerge. It's enough to make you want to keep on living!