OMG Squirrels.

I don't think I have much time, I can hear Ellie stirring. Ellie's sick again. I feel like we just keep passing various illnesses around our house this winter. Probably a result of being out so much more than we were last year. Anyway, this time we decided to take Ellie to the pediatrician (and, actually, I even called Tom home from work) because she looked about as bad as I've ever seen her. This is the girl who had an ear infection and didn't even start acting "off" until her eardrum was about to burst, and she was curled up in my lap, breathing hard and looking gray. It was terrible. She just kept zoning out and dozing off, even right after her nap. And since she was vomitting, she kept asking for water, but I had to tell her no to give her tummy a chance to rest. The pediatrician actually diagnosed her with strep and gave us some antibiotics and a medicine for her nausea. She took both when we got home, plus drank one and a half sippys of pedialyte and some crackers, and seemed to feel much better. She woke up again in the middle of the night to eat and drink again, and then she wanted to watch some Elmo. She's due for her next round of meds and I'm hoping she'll feel much better today. Of course, we had a busy weekend planned and this threw a monkey wrench in it, but sometimes you just need to rest and we don't want to pass along strep to anyone, either.

Have I talked about our squirrel issues on this blog yet? I can't remember...anyway, it's a long, long story. Basically, after we got back from Florida a couple of months ago, we started hearing what sounded like squirrels in the attic. Brought out a few companies for estimates, and nobody was quoting anything less than $1500 (well, except for one guy who couldn't tell whether they could even fix the holes or not). We decided to wait until our tax return came in, and then had a few more companies come out. At this point, I'd heard everything from "I don't see any holes, so we can just trap the squirrels" to "you need to have new insulation plus wrap the roofline in metal and I'll throw in a new attic fan". Frustrating. So then I remembered I have a cousin who has a husband who works for an animal/pest control company. I asked her for his advice and he basically said that we really wouldn't need new insulation for just a couple squirrels, which confirmed my thoughts that these companies were trying to take us for a ride. At that point, I called Critter Control (same company the cousin's husband works for, but a different location), and they came out and quoted us $500 to trap the squirrels, repair two holes and put up a new attic fan guard. Yay! We've already caught one squirrel.

Ooops, Ellie's up!