Quin Quickies

I have a backlog of things to blog about. They aren't particularly interesting sometimes, but since this blog represents my kids' baby book to some degree, it needs to be here for recording purposes.

All In a Day's Work

Quin is a big kid, the biggest in his class by several inches (more than that among the boys). It's probably not all that impressive considering that there are only 4 boys in his class and 8 kids overall, but it's still worth noting. During the first couple weeks of school we always have to work with him on transitioning from the anarchy of summer back into the more orderly, creativity killing environment that is school, and it can be a hard transition. Many notes and "red marks" during those first few weeks. 

One day we were particularly pleased to find a note sent home from one of the other teachers in the school who had gone out of their way to compliment Quinton on having helped out a smaller kid when he was having trouble opening the bathroom door. Apparently Quinton opened and held the door for him, and the teacher who witnessed this was impressed enough that they penned a little note. Jenny gave him an appropriate amount of praise to help encourage that behavior in the future, to which he responded, "All in a day's work, mom."

Breakfast

Jenny's on a food kick. I wouldn't necessarily call it a health food kick, nor would I call it anti-sugar, but she's definitely paying more attention to the ingredients on packaged goods to the point where cereal has moved considerably down on our list of proper breakfast options. Instead we will either make a huge batch of pancakes at the beginning of the week, make eggs, yogurt (the low sugar variety), or french toast. French toast is one we don't typically do either due to the complexity in preparing it and its inability to be frozen and still taste good on reheating (a la pancakes). When we do have it, though, it is a favorite. For some reason, though, Quin couldn't remember what it was called. For the longest time he called it "Canadian Toast." In fact, he was so enamored with Canada for the longest time that he was referring to himself as a African Canadian instead of an African American. That played out further to him eventually calling it "African American Toast." We knew what he meant... I'm not sure what he'll call it next time.

Mireille

I'm outing us to the world. Well, Jenny outed us on Facebook about a month ago, but this post makes it official - we are in the process of adopting a little girl from the Democratic Republic of Congo. In fact, we've been matched with our daughter for 18 months, and are in fact her legal parents by that country's laws. In a very strange combination of power plays and international politics, however, we are unable to bring her home to the United States. What's worse, we still have no idea when it might be that we will be able to bring her home. That aside, she is already starting to provide for some fun stories, which I always like to share.

On September 9, Mireille (that's her name) turned 2. 4 months prior to that she was relocated to a foster home in the capital city of Kinshasa in the western region of the DRC. On various occasions we tried to send things over to her; shoes, dresses, toys, but the shipping to the DRC is prohibitively expensive. I tried to send a small package, about 12 inches square on the top and 5 inches deep, it weighed no more than 8 pounds. Fedex was willing to ship it for $250. To get around that, we rely on people who are visiting the country to mule trinkets over there for her, which happens from time to time. For her birthday, however, we wanted to send her a present that actually got to her on the day.

Jenny played with the idea of just biting the bullet and sending something. We also looked into the possibility of there being an internet commerce site that had local shipping in Africa, but alas, we found none. We finally came up with the idea of just wiring money over and having our lawyer or one of his assistants help us out and get her a gift locally. So that's what we did.

Now, one would think that, of all the places in the world, you would be able to find a black doll in the center of the continent of Africa. Well, apparently not. What our lawyer managed to find was perhaps the creepiest, whitest doll that I could imagine.

It's good to find out that our daughter has some taste, however, as she clearly wants nothing to do with this doll. In fact, the whole series of pictures says to me that she'd rather mess around on her phone than have anything to do with that doll! Oh, she reminds me of my stateside kids already!

We're happy she at least likes the purse!

 

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The Great Mouse Caper

History

Quin loves pets. Ignore the fact that Heinz is our pet and he rarely is very nice to him. In fact, the nicest he typically is to him is when he ignores him. But if he finds a toad in the yard, or a stray bug on a window, he gets his ice cream pale, fills it with a little water and some leaves, and puts the poor thing in there until we force him to release the poor animal before they become a dead animal.

Mice!

Every autumn we get an influx of visitors. These are the types of visitors that we don't really welcome. We knew they were around one night a couple of weeks ago when Jenny woke up in the middle of the night to hear scratching on the insides of the walls. Mice...

So I did what I typically do - I set old fashioned, cheap, spring loaded, wooden traps. Baited with peanut butter, I've never had a problem eradicating the population in the past. And indeed it appeared it was going to work again. On the first two nights I was able to eliminate two of our guests.

The third night, however, I placed traps in the usual high traffic locales. When I checked them in the morning, the traps were still set, but there was no peanut butter on the tripping mechanism. So I reset the traps, and again in the morning, no bait. These were some talented mice... Deciding that I was going to have to bring out the big guns, I set another trap next to the existing traps, thinking that the mouse might accidentally step on one of the traps tripping mechanism in order to get to the bait on the other. Apparently they were too smart for that as well!

So the boys and I went to the hardware store to procure some glue traps. I'm not a fan of them, but we'll get to that in a minute. My thought process was to put the glue traps out next to the two unsprung traps without bait and wait for the mayhem to ensue. Imagine my luck, the very next day we had netted two new guests, one on one of the wooden spring traps - he was dead, and another in the glue trap - he was alive. Crap.

Now, I am a man, of course, but when I deal with mice, it takes every ounce of energy I have to muster up the courage to address what I know has to be done. I like the wooden traps as it kills the mice for me and I can just put a plastic bag around it to transport it outside - no rodent/human contact required. The glue traps, however, simply trap the mice so they can't get away. You have to wait for nature to starve them out or you need to address it yourself...

So, Quin and I discovered the mice the next day. I actually only saw one, and Quin went directly in to check it out. It was he who discovered that we had trapped another one in the mayhem device as I had hoped. When he saw the one mouse looking at us, alive in the glue trap, he immediately went and got his ice cream bucket. I explained to him that we weren't going to keep the mouse, but we had to take care of them and get them out of the house, so I got a plastic bag and started walking toward the mice.

As I walked toward it, the live mouse started FREAKING OUT, looking like he might even be able to escape the glue trap without some of his limbs and skin, and crawl away to die and rot somewhere in the house. Knowing that wasn't a good option, and not wanting to get bit, I knew what I had to do, but I also knew that I needed to get Quin out of there. Trying to be as calm as I could be, I asked him to leave. I wasn't very savvy, however, because even though he left, he immediately started sobbing uncontrollably. I took care of the situation, reluctantly and with as much dignity as I could muster, then got our guests out of the house as quickly as I could.

When I found Quin outside, tears were rolling down his face. "Is he dead?" he asked me. I said he was. I tried to smooth it over telling him that mice outside are great, but mice inside are dangerous to us. He seemed to accept that, even stating that "Heinzy might eat one and get sick, right?"

In the end, I'm still a little creeped out by having to whack the mouse over the head to put him out of his misery. But it makes me happy that Quin was upset by it. It means he has some grasp of the finality of death, and that he is likely not a sociopath or a psychopath, which I find endearing.

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