Why I enjoy being a girl-or The things Jeff does that I don't have to

Last week, while trying to carry out yet another of my whims, Jeff had to go under the house to reroute the cable so that we could watch t.v. in a different room.

I got it in my head that the "formal" living room was a dead space. Meaning, we never went in there, like, ever.

And wanting a great room where you could sit and talk at the kitchen table without competing with the t.v. became a priority.

So the living room became where we watch t.v., and the family room has become where we hang out and talk.

It's working out lovely. I love it, the kids love it, and Jeff was an absolute dear to arrange it all for me.

But it was not without it's costs to Jeff's peace of mind.

I didn't talk about it on this blog, but I mentioned a few months back on Facebook that we had rats.

Yes. Yuck. Yikes.

Somehow a family of them took up residence under our house. I won't go into details of how we discovered this, cuz well, it still gives me shivers. And not the good kind.

Thanks to good old fashioned rat traps, surrounded by mice traps, we got 4 of them.

We kept laying out the traps until we had no more rats show up in them.

But each time Jeff would open the trap door to under the house, I would mention how I thought it was starting to smell different=meaning:bad.

But he thinks my nose if oversensitive, and I admit it is. So he didn't worry about it, and I pushed it to the back of my mind.

Until the night he went under the house.

We were on the phone to eachother so that I could help thread the cable up through the floor.
As Jeff worked his way to the far corner of the craw space, he says "Oh my gosh."

And I say "What?!" Cuz of course I'm thinking, more rats."

And he replies"You don't want to know."

To which I say"You found a dead one didn't you? That's why it smells weird."

Jeff "yes. this is disgusting." I got to listen to a bunch of "yuck, nasty, oohhhh" and other exclamations of disgusted-ness.

Now Jeff is not of a weak stomach. The man has cleaned up some pretty nasty things being the father of 6 children and a wife who gets really sick when she is pregnant. So he can handle it.

But I'm pretty sure this put his resolve and strong stomach skills to the test.

And because he was underneath the house, way in the corner, and was not prepared to remove dead, rotting rodents, he had to improvise.

I suggested he use his shirt. He didn't like that idea.

So he tore some of the tarp stuff they lay down as a moisture barrier, somehow removed it from it's nest where it died, and wrapped the deceased creature in it.

When he emerged from under the house, I would like to say I was there welcoming my hero home.

But I was hiding.

I didn't care if the thing was wrapped up, I didn't even want to see that much.

I do not have a strong stomach. At all.

And I decided that I was right. When I had started smelling something from the crawl space, I told Jeff that I thought one parent just curled up and died when it's mate and children were snapped.

And I still think that is true.

And while I can sort of sympathize with that, I still believe that the only good rat, is a dead rat.

Or a rubber one.