It smells like burnt rodent!

I've never really been a huge fan of creepy crawly things.  I remember in middle school there was a little mouse in my closet and I refused to sleep in my room for a week AFTER it was killed.  If I remember right, the only reason I ended up going back there is because my Mom kicked me out of her bed and cleaned my room to prove it wasn't there anymore.  I wouldn't completely freak out when I saw bugs (I'm thinking about 2 of our foster girls when I say this, Mom you know who I am talking about), but I preferred not to have them around and would kill them when I saw them.  If I ever saw a bug in my glass I would refuse to drink out of it until it was cleaned.  Now it's not uncommon for me to see bugs crawling in the silverware drawer.  What is my reaction, I either pretend I didn't see it and eat off it anyway, or grab the one below it hoping that it is cleaner!!

Oh how my life has changed!

Having encounters with rats, mice, giant spiders, and cockroaches are every day occurrences.  When we first moved down here I tried to avoid places where I knew there would be rats, now I walk in there and don't even think about it.  There have been several times over the past 7 months that I have had great insect/rodent stories that I have wanted to blog about, but haven't had the time.  Well here are a few recent ones that I decided I would share.

Cockroaches:
I went to put Eventz back in his bed one night and I saw some giant black thing move in his crib.  It was a large cockroach.  Since my hands were full, I called in Nick who was up feeding one of the twins and had him kill the bug so that I could put Eventz in bed.

Several months ago I was up feeding a baby and had a large cockroach run across my foot.  I killed it and continued on with the feeding, not really thinking much of it.  When I was finished I was crawling back in bed and saw another giant cockroach just hanging out on our mosquito net.  When I say giant, I mean at least an inch long, so quite large.  A volunteer woke up once and had one on her face.  Hopefully I will never have that experience.

Then on New Years Eve I was quite tired and getting ready for bed.  I opened up my retainer case and guess what was inside?  A cockroach.  I'm ok with a lot of things, but I am not ok with cockroaches sleeping in my retainer case.

Spiders:
Large wall spiders are common here.  They aren't dangerous and instead help eat the mosquitos and other bugs.  Most of the time when I see them I let them be, but there are times when I just can't handle them.  When deciding whether to kill a wall spider, you have to decide how dedicated you are because these buggers are FAST!

About a week ago, I went to grab a bottle out of the bin for Eventz, when all of a sudden I noticed I was about to grab a spider.  I recruited Nick to kill it, because I knew I would never be fast enough and I really didn't want it crawling around on my cupboards.

I have encountered several tarantulas while living here, fortunately all have been dead.  Nick has killed a few himself though!

Rodents:
We had been seeing some signs of a rodent in our house, and Nick thought that it was probably a mouse, not a rat.  Well we set a trap and guess what we caught, a rat!  A few nights went by and we assumed we had taken care of the problem, when we heard a bunch of stuff on our counter fall to the ground.  Apparently not.  I was up the next night feeding the twins when I heard a noise come from the oven area.  All the sudden I saw a rat run across my kitchen.  I sat there completely still for a few seconds, and then I saw it run back in the direction it came from.  Nick moved the trap and a few hours later, we had rat number 2!!  We thought that they were coming in through our gas line for our stove, so we filled that in.  Once again we assumed that we had solved the problem, and we had, for a few nights at least.

Today we were making lunch and there was a small noise coming from the oven.  We joked around that it was probably a mouse who was trying to get away from the heat.  A few minutes later we heard a LOT of noise coming from the oven and were convinced that it was in fact some sort of rodent that was being forced to move because of the heat inside.  When we were done cooking, we looked inside.  There was no rat/mouse, but there was several giant chunks of rodent hair in there. I kept telling Nick that it smelled like burnt rodent but he said I was being dramatic. Guess that means we are once again setting a trap in our house and hopefully getting rat number 3!!  We don't know where they are getting in at, but will hopefully find out soon!

Nick has killed 36 rats since we have been here.  Most of those were in the first month when he set traps every night.  He hasn't done this for a long time and until just a few days ago, he hardly ever set any traps, but is starting to get back into it.  No matter how many we kill, there just always seems to be more.

The rodents here aren't like you would expect them to be.  They don't run away when you walk into a room or make a noise.  Instead, they stare at you and have this look that says "are you really going to make me move, or are you going to leave the room?'

No worries though, it's