You are never gonna believe this. Really. Trust me.

Okay, so the last time I posted I was tired and mad and just generally in a funk. But now the carnival is over and at least that is behind us.

But now we, the Divas, are on to bigger, better and more stressfully weird things. As I said in the title, you really aren't going to believe this.


Okay, so we live in the country and we get mice in the house. It's one of those facts of life things. Well, last week sometime we started noticing a smell in our house. Last year we got the dead mouse smell really bad in our house when we killed a momma mouse and her little orphaned babies started rotting. Gross, yes. Was I sorry? Nah, not really. I mean, dead mouse smell is not pleasant, but in my mind it at least means that there is one less mouse on the planet and thus, in my house. But dead mouse only smells bad about 2 or 3 days. After 3 days the smell didn't dissipate, it got worse. Much worse. So bad that I was spraying Neutra Air about every 30 minutes in an attempt to eliminate the odor. I am having people over to my house tonight and I was considering cancelling because of the smell. It was that bad.

We took out all the trashes and bleached the cans. That didn't help and I was getting desperate. The smell was much worse out here in my office so we started assuming that the dead critter was behind my computer desk or in the wall or a closet. TaterSis gagged when she walked into my office the other day. Yeah. I was mortified and more than disgusted.

So Thursday night, Paul brought the kids home from the carnival while I stayed to sling the remaining nacho cheese and then clean it all up. He bathed the kids and put them to bed and then decided that he was going to find that smell, by golly. He checked all of the kitchen cabinets first because that is where they usually die - the multiple traps may have something to do with that. He then checked behind the washer and dryer because the smell was getting pretty bad in there. He found nothing in there. The utility room and my office share a wall, so he continued on toward the ever-growing smell. He opened the small closet out here and gagged when the smell hit him. Bingo.

That closet houses our hot water heater, a rubbermaid box of my old dolls, the fold-up lawnchairs, a bb gun and Paul's work uniforms. He emptied that closet entirely. Then grabbed the spotlight and went to work.

Here's what he found:
















Those, my friends, are yellow jackets. A whole HIVE of yellow jackets.

IN

MY

HOUSE







Remember the post about killing the little stingers all over my house? Yeah, turns out we shouldn't have been worried so much about them entering the house because they were already in here!

Paul used a whole can of Raid wasp spray on the paper hive and after the frantic, angry, dying buzzing stopped, he started knocking away the paper nest. We kind of figured, okay, you knock down the paper nest and voila the bees are gone. Uhhhh, no . . . that would be entirely too easy for a Diva adventure. There was a space of a few inches where the concrete and sheetrock don't mesh and the paper nest on the outside was only to protect the massive combs up inside the wall. The outside paper hive was as big as Sam's head and the combs that were up inside the wall were pretty extensive. We honestly have no idea how many or how big they were/are.

He hooked a wire coat hanger and dug up in the wall until he pulled out a monstrous piece of comb with the queen on it. Now, we are not professional bug killers. Heck, neither of us are even college-educated. In our minds, you take away the queen and the bugs go away. We are just so silly sometimes.

I jumped on the computer while he was performing his coat hanger operation and looked up yellow jackets, bees, wasps, hornets, lions and tigers and bears, oh my! From what I found, yes, they were yellow jackets and while not normal, it's not uncommon that they would nest inside the walls of a house. It told us to call an exterminator. Hmmm . . . Christmas presents for the kids or professional extermination of nasty horde of stinging insects? We'll take what's behind door #1, Bob. So after he disposed of the queen, he sprayed more of the residual poison up in the wall and called it good. Like I said, calling an exterminator just wasn't an option.

Yesterday morning Paul got up and filled the space with dirt and gravel and was going to pick up some expanding foam stuff at work to seal in the space in the closet and the space under the siding where they were entering. (Yeah, it's rather unnerving to stand in your backyard and watch yellowjacket after yellowjacket fly up under the siding of your house.) That done, he left for work and the kids and I stayed here to play and slobber and wipe snot and stuff. (Just to clarify, I never slobbered.)

About 9:30 I walked into my utility room and heard buzzing. Angry, loud buzzing. I ran out here to the closet and slammed the door shut, hoping to darken the closet and not give any option of going toward the light. The problem with my theory and subsequent plan of action was that the door to that closet is a vented door. Slats from top to bottom. Duh. I told you I played on too many chat piles as a kid. Then I shut the door from the living room to the playroom. Again, a vented door. It just gets better, doesn't it? But in my mind, we were safe. I was so, so wrong.

Cute Little Baby has dreams of being an Olympic Speed Crawler and shot off like a rocket toward the toyroom. I saw him working up speed and headed after him. Then I heard the screaming. Ohhhhhh the screaming!! I knew it before I ever saw a bug or a stinger or even him. He was holding his little hand in the air and just bellering. I tried to grab his hand but he would have none of that so I just scooped him up because the yellowjackets were starting to swarm around my head. I slammed the door shut, screaming baby in my arms and ran to the dining room. I held the baby down with my leg because he was so uncontrollable, bless his heart. After I scraped the stinger out of his finger I hollered to Kady, "GET OUT OF THE HOUSE!!" put the little baby in the carseat, grabbed the big baby by the hand and we ran. Then I realized I was in my nightgown still.

So I put the kids in the van and ran back in the house to throw on some sweats then jumped in the van and sped off down the driveway. I called CLB's mom to tell her he got stung because she, herself, is allergic to stings. So not cool. She said she'd call the doctor and call me back. I drove towards the school because Paul had gone to pick up some carnival stuff and I was hoping to catch him on the road somewhere and bring him back home to save us from peril. He had already left the school. Dang! I have one freaked out nearly 4 year old in the back of my van (in her pajamas), one screaming baby and another baby who was so stunned at what was taking place that he just sat there slack-jawed and drooling. So I called Wal*Mart and told them to have him call me immediately when he got there. CLB's mom called back and told me what the doctor said, all was well, sting sensitivity isn't usually hereditary, give him Benadryl, etc etc. I pulled back into my driveway to wait for Paul's call and realized I was still in my bunny slippers.

So I made CLB a bottle, let Kady out to play in the driveway, gave CBB some Cheerios (Thank God I'd left the diaper bag in the van overnight.) and then braved my house to get the Motrin and Benadryl. The noise was so creepy! All that buzzing was totally out of a horror movie. Or at least a documentary on Discovery.

Paul came home to fight off the bugs. By that time there were hundreds more dead in the closet. At least the poison was working. Evidently the one that stung the baby was dying as well because we found a bunch in the floor later. The kids and I stayed outside - thank God it was a warm day. I called the college and asked if I could speak to the entymology guy and he asked for samples of the combs, nest and some of the bugs.

Here's what I learned:
This particular species of yellow jacket is closely related to the bald-faced hornet. Very aggressive, very mean. They have the most toxic venom of all stinging critters, but the fact that they are so small keeps them from being as deadly as a hornet. He opened the eggs that were in the combs and they were ready to hatch. He said that the cool weather was what kept us from being really badly hurt by them swarming, but he said it's a good thing we found them before we got the fireplace going because once the house warmed up they would've swarmed to the point we would've been stepping on them, sleeping with them, eating them and sitting on them. We would've had to have left our house. He said that the reason they had been out so bad in the house is because a new batch had evidently just hatched and there were many more to come. He was confuzzled by the fact that both times we had a sting, the stinger was left in because yellow jackets are multiple stingers usually. They are ground-dwellers but because the siding lip was so low to the ground they probably thought they were going underground.

Oh. And the smell? Well, he said they could've very well stung a mouse to death and that's what we're smelling, but he said more than likely it was just the nest. I think Paul would have to agree. While he was pulling the nest out, he ended up vomiting the smell was so bad. The bug dude said they sting other insects and bring them back to the nest, chew them up, regurgitate them and stuff the barf into the comb, lay an egg and seal it up. Then the babies eat it, poop it and what you smell is rotting bug and stinky rotting bug poo.

We have now sealed off the closet with plexiglass and masking tape and, per his instructions, we will be setting off a bomb a day for six days to eliminate any in the walls. Hopefully.

I just want this week to be over.