2023 – Page 3 – Terry Family Shenanigans

Here Comes February

Like January, February seemed to stick to the tradition schedule. There is more days off of school between teacher conferences, snow days, holidays, and this year we added another day off for the Super Bowl Parade since the Chiefs won.

Emilee made her Valentines box to take to school for her Valentines Party. After this year she had one year left before there will be no more kids making Valentine’s Boxes in our house.😢 She did a great job and did everything on her own including coming up with the idea, gathering supplies and creating it. When she was all done she had an adorable Valentine’s Day Fox Box.

Matthew and Campbell went to the school dance. Matthew called it Winter Homecoming but I think that is not the right name. It is probably Sweethearts or something like that since it is in February. That is what all the other schools called it. I was in Idaho when he went to the dance but Campbell’s mom Lisa sent me some pictures. Between Matthew and Ryan they were able to pull an outfit together. They had a fun time. They went with a group of Campbell’s friends, and ate dinner at Sake Lounge before the dance. Campbell is a Sweetheart because she does not like sushi but she agreed to go there for dinner because Matthew loves it. Those are the same pants he wore to the dance in October and he has already outgrown them. He loves that he is obviously taller than her now and she can wear heals if she wants.

The day after the dance was the Super Bowl. The Kansas City Chiefs were in it so everyone was pretty excited. Ross and Lauren and Roger and Rhonda came over to our house. There was lots of yummy food and it was a really close game. It came down to a field goal the last few seconds of the game that won it for us. I was driving home from the airport at the time. I had seen some of the game on the airplane. Lots of people would cheer whenever we scored. There was tons of decorations and a balloon tunnel at the airport set up for when the players came home. I was trying to hurry home in time to catch the last few minutes but as I was getting off the freeway at my exit a bunch of red, gold, and white fireworks started going off. I knew we had won. As I pulled into my driveway about five minutes later there were still fireworks going off everywhere and people running all over cheering that the Chiefs had won. Kansas City has some good fans.

Busy Weekends

January was a typical January. Kind of slow. Just the way I like it so we can recover and relax from the busy months before. By the end of January baseball, horse lessons, piano, gymnastics were all up and going. We had lots of things going on each weekend so Ryan and I would divide and concur the best that we could.

Like he does each year, Grandpa Terry started off one of the weekends in January celebrating his birthday. He turned 71. We told him we would make or get any food he wanted for his dinner and strongly hinted at BBQ. He said he wanted to go with easy to get, eat, and clean up so he picked pizza. After asking him 5 times to make sure he really didn’t want BBQ we picked up some pizza (we made sure one had every topping they offer on it just for Grandpa) and we celebrated with dinner followed by cake. His boys and his two oldest grandsons took him on an axe throwing adventure. They all felt very manly and proud of themselves when they got back. Ethan was concerned about not being able to throw the axe far enough and ended up being the best of them at it. Rhonda made a chocolate cake and a cherry cheesecake for him. In true pre-covid fashion we put candles on the cake and he blew them all out. I am all for blowing out candles but I think taking a piece for the birthday person and putting the candles on just their piece to spit on when they blow out is more my style. However, I am often overruled though and called a germ-a-phob or fun hater. All in all I think Grandpa had a fun birthday.

The next day was another big day. Ryan’s biological mom Sherrie, her husband Dave, daughter Genevieve and her son Eric came up to finally meet Rhonda and Roger in person. It has been a highly anticipated meeting since we found Sherrie two years ago. Ryan was a nervous wreck all week. He was really worried Rhonda would change her mind or hurl back handed ‘compliments’ or barely veiled insults when she met Sherrie. The day before they came, Rhonda decided she wanted to call Sherrie and talk with her over the phone first. They said they ended up talking for three hours and it was a great conversation. That put Ryan at ease a little bit and when they arrived in person it went pretty well. We all sat around and talked for a bit then Rhonda and Sherrie kind of split off and talked and looked at photos. Gen and Dave talked with the rest of us and Eric jumped right in to play with Emilee and Jovee. Rhonda and Sherrie just kept talking. Everyone else went to Top Golf and played games. Rhonda told me afterwards that she was really glad she finally met her and she really liked Sherrie. She said she felt like she was talking with a long lost friend. Ryan and I were very happy that they got along and made a friend in each other.

Instead of going golfing with everyone, Allison and I headed to Salina Kansas for a gymnastic tournament. She did a pretty good job. She placed 9th overall, and had one of her best bar routines yet. She is still loving gymnastics. We are proud of her for how hard she works and how much effort she puts into it. Right when we arrived it started snowing so by the time we left a few hours later there was a pretty good snow storm. We had to go a little slower but we were still able to make it home.

Vermin

About a week into the New Year, it was a regular evening. The kids were all at youth night at the church. I sat down to work on a puzzle we had out from Christmas. Ryan said he was going down to the basement to work on the computer. We were set up for a nice relaxing evening after work and the events of the day. A few minutes later Ryan called me to come look at something. After a sigh, one more sip of my hot chocolate and begrudgingly unwrapping from my cocoon of my favorite blanket I went downstairs.

He had found little black things scattered around the top of the desk and couldn’t figure out what they were. We thought they were insects…dirt…crumbs…they weren’t much bigger than a flake of pepper. We weren’t sure, we wiped them up and decided to see if they came back. I went back upstairs, wrapped back up in my cocoon. A few seconds later I snapped a satisfying piece into my puzzle and the words ‘mouse poop’ popped in my head. I have never seen mouse poop so I wasn’t sure. I decided to google it- sure enough that’s what it was. Ryan had the same thought and we both hollered to each other that we thought is was mouse poop at the same time. We looked around and found a few more spots that had evidence of the disgusting rodents. Immediately everything in our clean cozy little house turned to contaminated, dirty, soiled nastiness in my mind. So instead of relaxing and enjoying our evening we cleaned up everything we found, bundled up and went out in the nasty cold weather to Menards to get some mouse traps. I was still hoping it wasn’t mice, Ryan was pretty certain. We decided to buy one of each kind of trap and see which ones worked and get more of those. We told the kids to pick up any messes and no food was allowed anywhere outside the kitchen and dishes had to be done ASAP after eating.

We crawled into bed. Wondering if there were just mice running around the house like they owned the place every night. Then I heard Allison crying in her room. I went to see what was wrong and she was distraught that we were going to torture the mice and kill them. I tried to explain we weren’t torturing them but we were going to kill them. We came to the agreement that we would use traps that killed them immediately or caught them alive and then dad would take them to the field by his work and release them AND provide video evidence of their release. Crisis averted we went to bed.

The next morning we had THREE dead mice!! THREE!! To make matters a little worse the only traps that worked were the sticky pads…not Allison approved. They completely avoided the rest of the traps. That day was spent cleaning, disinfecting, throwing things away, and putting anything the mice might take as food into a plastic storage bin with a lid. We bought a lot more sticky pads. I researched mice and learned way more then I ever wanted to know about them. Allison made it clear that her trust in us was gone and we were murderers. We had a lengthy conversation about why mice are gross and shouldn’t cohabitate with humans. I apologized that we were going to be using the sticky traps. I had not lied to her but now that I had more information then the night before I had to update our plans. She couldn’t get the image out of her head that they would bite there own legs off to get away from the sticky traps. I told her I thought the sticky traps had poison on them or something because the mice were all dead in the morning.

We ended up catching multiple mice several days in a row, for a grand revolting total of seven. I kept thinking I couldn’t believe we had seven mice running around and no idea. More mice than people!!! I don’t think they were here very long though. The week of Christmas it got really cold. Several days of -5 or more. We think that is when they moved in under the sink for warmth. I deep cleaned the entire house before we moved in and never saw any evidence. I had cleaned several times since we moved in and not seen any either. Since we caught number seven we have seen no more evidence and the traps are checked and moved around regularly. Hopefully we are done with the gross disease carrying vermin.

That was the end of the mice drama until about a week after the last mouse was caught. Allison stepped on a sticky trap. She had a shoe on but was concerned she was going to spread poison all over the house.🤦‍♀️🤷‍♀️