The Mouse House

This the story of how I became “The Happy Housewife.” You might want to start at the beginning.

It was hard to believe that the house was actually worse in the daylight than in the dark. The light revealed how dirty the house really was. I quickly got to work cleaning every square inch of that place before we moved in.

I remember cleaning the windows and going through two rolls of paper towels. Each window was covered with a layer of black dirt (which we later found out was soot). We cleaned the appliances several times over and I even ventured into the basement to sweep it out.

Thankfully I didn’t see any mice in my cleaning. Maybe it was just crazy coincidence that we saw a mouse the day we looked at the house?

The moving truck came, delivered our stuff, and we quickly got to work setting up our new home in Virginia. I think I had the whole house unpacked in less than a week. I wanted to be settled before the baby arrived.

In Florida, Sailor was told by the military not to take his nursing exam in Florida since he would be working in Virginia. This was a mistake (or maybe not). There was a problem getting the paperwork together for him to take the exam in Virginia and since he wasn’t licensed he couldn’t officially work as a nurse at the hospital. He was given a day job until the paperwork mess was sorted out.

The paperwork mess lasted almost six months. While all our nursing friends worked rotating shifts Sailor worked from 7-4 and had most weekends off. It was nice.

A few weeks after we moved in I went into the basement and it was filled with about two feet of water. Sailor tried to figure out the source of the water. The kids splashed and played in our basement swimming pool. I was worried that our washer and dryer would be ruined and called the landlord.

Our landlord sent over a repairman who couldn’t figure out the source of the leak but managed to get the water out of the basement. While cleaning up the mess we found a large piece of plywood under the stairs. Scrawled on the plywood were the words… “the basement floods….”

Of course that would have been nice to know before we put all our extra boxes in the basement, but fortunately only a things were ruined. We bought cinderblocks to put the washer and dryer on in case of future flooding and put anything worth saving on makeshift shelving.

The basement flooded several more times until a plumber finally figured out that tree roots had grown into the underground pipes in the yard. Our basement had been backing up with sewage!

I hated that basement and hated that I had to go down there almost every day to do the laundry.

Spring arrived in Virginia and the kids were enjoying the nice back yard. We met our “back yard neighbors” and we even built steps so they could climb the fence.

One night in the back yard Sailor saw a rat running across the power line. A few weeks later there was a dead rat under our car in the driveway. I still hadn’t seen any in the house but was starting to get worried.

At seven months pregnant I strained my back moving furniture. It was so bad I wasn’t able to walk our daughter to school. I went to the doctor and he gave me muscle relaxers but I refused to take them. It was getting so bad that I was unable to do basic chores around the house.

The doctor kept telling me that I needed to rest for a few days in order to get better. I told him that mom’s don’t have time to rest. He told me if I didn’t he would admit me to the hospital for some forced rest. It got so bad that my daughter came home from school with a picture she had drawn. It was me moving the coffee table and she was standing in the background crying, she had a bubble over her head that said, “No mommy, no!”

I decided I would take the muscle relaxers and rest for a few days. My back finally started to feel better.

One evening the kids woke up in the middle of the night screaming. Even though they had their own rooms they always slept in the same room. They loved being together! We ran in the room and they both told us they saw a mouse run across the room and under the bed.

They knew about the rats in the yard, so we wondered if it was just their imagination. They were sure it wasn’t. Sailor searched the room for a mouse but couldn’t find anything. They wouldn’t go back to sleep so we all ended up sleeping together.

I started to worry about our new baby, I didn’t want mice crawling all over them as he or she slept in the crib. I had never seen a live mouse in the house (except for the day we signed the lease) but I was starting to believe they were everywhere.

May arrived and the temperature started to rise in Virginia. We turned on our odd wall a/c unit and it made some horrible sounds and then died. We called our landlord and he said he didn’t think it could be fixed.

Now, everyone knows you don’t tell a woman who is nine months pregnant that the a/c cannot be fixed. They will hurt you. I didn’t even last 24 hours, I told Sailor he needed to go straight to Home Depot and buy a window unit for our bedroom. We could all sleep in there until the landlord did something about the air.

Since the unit was so old it couldn’t be fixed so the landlord decided to put window units in a few of the rooms. It wasn’t ideal, but at least I wasn’t a big, hot, sweaty mess.

Memorial Day weekend Sailor’s family came to visit. We had a great time and on Memorial Day Sailor had to work. I woke up feeling a little funny and since last time I felt funny I had a baby a few hours later so I decided to head to the hospital.

Sailor was already there working and my doctor was on call. He decided I was in early labor so I was admitted. We were going to have a Memorial Day baby.

We still didn’t have a name picked out so we joked with the doctor and nurses about baby names, played cards, and hung out with our friends (all who worked at the hospital). It was weird knowing most of the doctor’s and nurses, but it was also kind of nice.

Our healthy and happy baby boy was born that evening, just in time for our doctor to make his Memorial Day party. I felt great until I was taken to the post partum floor.

Apparently the people who redesigned the hospital thought it would be a good idea to have people share rooms (and bathrooms) after they have a baby. (These people had obviously never had a baby) So there I was with our baby, and on the other side of the curtain was another lady and her baby. I didn’t sleep a single second that night. If my baby wasn’t crying her baby was. It was horrible. .

When Sailor came to visit the next day I cried and told him he had to get me out of the hospital. I couldn’t stand to be there one more second. Unfortunately our baby needed to circumcised and that wasn’t going to happen until the next day.

Fortunately my roommate was discharged that afternoon and I think Sailor pulled a few strings so I didn’t end up with another roommate that night.

The next day I couldn’t wait to get home see my other kids. They took happy baby off to be circumcised and I started packing up my stuff. They brought him back all bundled up and sound asleep. I waited for my discharge paperwork and Sailor to come take us home.

The paperwork took longer than expected and I ended up waiting for over two hours. Finally happy baby woke up and I went to change his diaper. I unwrapped him from the blanket and saw blood running down his legs.

I took off his diaper and it was filled with blood.