Home Skunked Home

I can't believe I haven't written since mommy and Hadley came home from the hospital; but it has been really busy around here. Mommy and Hadley came home Monday afternoon, and we had approximately 36 hours of calm before calamity set in. Wednesday morning, mommy and I were in the playroom playing with my trains when mommy caught a whiff of something terrible. She asked Gran if she smelled it, too, so Gran opened the back door to see if it was coming from outside. Almost simultaneously, the odor permeated the entire house. It smelled like a gas leak and a chemical fire. It was awful. Gran went to wake up daddy while mommy looked up the fire department's phone number to see what, if anything, we should do. The fire department said we needed to evacuate the house immediately, so we all piled into mommy's brand new SUV and carefully pulled out of the ice-covered driveway into the cul-de-sac. Good thing, too, because the fumes in the house had been so strong that they were making us all dizzy. Oddly enough, we seemed to keep smelling them in the car.

Moments later, not one, not two, not three, but FIVE fire trucks came roaring down our street with lights and sirens blaring. It was AWESOME!!! So much excitement - and it wasn't even 7 AM yet! It was a little scary, too, though. The fireman got out of the truck and almost immediately declared that we did not have a gas leak, but we (read W) had been sprayed by a skunk! No wonder we kept smelling the gas in the car since W was in there with us.

We spent the rest of the week trying to recover from our visit from Pepe le Pieu. Mommy and Gran did at least 50 loads of laundry; while daddy gave the boys a billion baths and scoured the carpet, furniture, and everything W came in contact with. Still, the smell lingers. It lingered on daddy when he went to Pet Smart to get some skunk-be-gone and all of the dogs barked at him. It lingered on Gran when she went to the grocery store and people kept saying they smelled something bad. It lingered on daddy and me three days later when we went to a birthday party and people kept whispering about how they smelled something awful. It lingers still.

Mommy thinks that maybe God sent us the skunk so we would be able to forget how scary Hadley's arrival into the world was. She made the mistake of saying she didn't think she'd ever be able to sleep again after Hadley was born; cleaning up after Pepe changed all that. We sleep like babies - soundly until it is time for the actual baby to eat!

In the mean time, I've at long last been rapidly expanding my vocabulary. I can name all of the "Really Useful Engines," can say "stop and go," "Ghee = Gran," "please," and "thank you," to name a few. Also, I now say "cheese" anytime I see a camera within 10 feet. I can't let my two week old sister upstage me, you know.

Speaking of which, I'm loving being a big brother. I give Hadley kisses all the time. Mommy tells me that I need to be gentler with her; but I know that Hadley really wants to bounce really high in the bouncer, and I'm all too happy to oblige. I also know she doesn't mind when I try to thoroughly examine her eyes, nose, and mouth with my fingers.