Salmonella in Your Socks

First, the background story: Fruit flies have been plaguing our house for the better part of two weeks. We have cleaned up, put away, throw out and disinfected to no avail. Today I even checked all the heater vents on the main floor to see if Jacob (who likes picking them up) had stuffed some fruit down in one and it was now moldy and rotten. Nothing. Yesterday at lunch they had seemed particularly bad and one landed on Maddie's sandwich. She flipped out. "The bugs are getting me!! They are eating my lunch! Help me!!" she screamed as tears began to roll down her cheeks. Being near my wits end with the situation myself, I tried to comfort her that a quick waft of her hand could scare them away. When she calmed from her hysteria into more of a general state of agitation I laid out my proposal. "I don't know exactly why we have fruit flies. I can't seem to get rid of them no matter what I do, but I can't do this alone. See that yogurt cup from breakfast you guys left out? And the smashed banana no one bothered to wipe up when they squished it on the table? That stuff attracts the flies. Does anyone ever have small little "spills" when they pee in the toilet? That attracts flies. Keeping them away is a family project and if you want them gone we can all work on it together." They were so frustrated with the situation they were actually sold on the idea! We set to work. They cleaned up the table, even wiped the whole thing down. Every trash can in the house was taken to the back yard. Every toilet was scrubbed and the floors by the ones that they use most. I even threw out the flower my friends gave me for teaching at Super Saturday in behalf of our cause. We checked the entire kitchen for any produce laying about. "Now we wait," I told them. They should be gone in two days. Fast forward to this morning: Today was laundry day (defined as such because if I don't wash today, I'll have to wear the last pair of underwear and I really hate the "emergency" pair). I was quite pleased with myself. Maddie and I had everything sorted early. Load one washed and dried. Load two in the washer. Go to move load two from washer to dryer. Lift the lid and there is still water in it. Weird. Why didn't it spin and drain out? Button says it finished it's cycle. It can't break. I don't have time for that. Ugh. Wait. My socks are starting to feel kinda wet. Oh heck. There are soap suds on the floor under the sink and it's full of water. Dang it! I was so careful! See, sometimes when I grab a bucket of laundry to dump in the washer, something falls out the back side of the bucket into the sink. When that happens, it gets sucked down to the drain and blocks it off so the water can't drain out...and it overflows...and makes a big stinking mess. I remove Brian's sock and the water immediately drains out of the sink. I turn the washing machine on again to rinse and spin. Then I commence the drying out and cleaning up of the water mess. Yuck. When it's pretty much done as much as I can figure other than to let it dry out I look in the sink just one more time shaking my head about the stupid situation I find myself in. Wait. What's in the drain now? I reach in and sweep my finger around pulling out a piece of old, raw chicken. NO!! That's disgusting! How did that ever get in there? Oh yeah... Two weeks ago I went to get frozen chicken from the deep freeze. The chicken breasts had clumped together so I started banging the bag on the metal washer top to break them up so I could take what I wanted and leave the rest. It was a 20 lb bag and it got a little unruly and one chicken breast tried to escape. I snagged it out of the sink, put the rest away and went upstairs to wash it up. And that's how we got raw chicken in our basement sink. I'm hoping and praying it is the source of these horrible flies that will NOT go away. With a two day life span, we'll know soon enough, but I have high hopes for a quick resolution to my problem. Keep your fingers crossed for me. Now, I suppose I ought to go and disinfect that sock for salmonella. Or maybe I can skip it since I don't intend to put the sock in my mouth.

Laundry - We've Crossed the Hump

No getting around it. We take four loads of laundry each week now. Yuck.

What Do You Mean It Isn't For Me?

This week I have been dutifully going about the arduous task of rotating the kids clothes. The bigger sized come out of boxes that are hauled up from the basement and placed into their drawers. The things they have outgrown have now made a pile so large that the pile has outgrown the closet where I throw them. I sorted into three piles, one for each child. Then folded and sorted by size printed on the tags. Finally bag them and label the bags before hauling them back down three stories to the basement. Oh the exciting joys of my life are so underwhelming some days, aren't they?

In the mess that we called the living room during the process, Maddie found the newborn Santa suit the Bairds gave us when Jacob was born. She was elated and ecstatic to wear the dress up she had just discovered. I told her it was Jacob size wouldn't fit her. She was not deterred. She sat down to get it on. She got one foot, then the other and proclaimed, "See!?!?! If fits me!!!" Then she stood and found the first arm and pulled and pulled and pulled. She couldn't get it up over her shoulder. Oh well, she decided. She'd just get the other arm in. No luck. Couldn't even get her hand in the hole. Finally, she gave up trying to get it all the way on and decided what she had was good enough. She waddled over and asked for the hat. I obliged and she set off to play. That lasted all of two minutes as she discovered she could barely move her feet and couldn't use her right hand at all. Cracked me up.

As far as clothes go, I'm becoming lots less conservative about saving everything. When Maddie was born I still had every stitch of clothing Ben ever wore. Even the stuff I hated. I have this paranoid idea in my head that if Brian ever lost his job, I'd need a million old stained onesies because I wouldn't have money to by new ones.

My kids have more clothes than they need most of the time. Having an abundance is nice in that I am only pushed to finish the laundry every two weeks. Mind you I said FINISH. I do wash every week. We just have to rumage through the clean basket to find what we need. I'm sure no one else in the world has that problem, right?