Thursday early

If you get up early enough these days you get to see the sun. The clouds don't seem to arrive until after 7:00 am. I love waking up and seeing blue sky, brief though it is. Today, we woke to some excitement. Nothing gets the children up early in a better mood than something exciting going on. Today the cats had left us a live present in the kitchen.

Trevor went downstairs for breakfast when I heard his voice shout "Mom there is a giant cockroach, no, its a rat" It turned out to be a huge mole behind the garbage can quivering in fear. Now here is the debate. Its animal awareness week at school. I have been hearing lectures from Trevor about animal abuses, torture, drug testing, etc. We can't just kill this poor mole. We will need to get it back outside.

I tell Trevor to get the broom and try to sweep it to the door. That is unsuccessful. Moles can't see and they don't like bright light. The last thing that mole wanted to do was go out the door. Trevor eventually got a bowl from the kitchen and trapped the mole. He carried the animal outside. You could hear the animal's fearful squeals. Once on the grass it started to dig. It was gone in seconds. So, now I have a mole in my yard. Its going to put mole hills everywhere until the cats trap it again.

Meanwhile, we are all up and dressed and ready to go, two hours early to the hospital. Usually it is a rush to get ready and out the door. Not today. We were all up and jazzed by the mole chase. I will have to ask Tom if he saw the mole on the way out the door this morning. Not that it would make any difference. Catching animals falls into one of my job categories. Tom walked by a live snake one morning outside our room. He thought it was one of the boy's toy plastic snakes. Trevor found and identified the snake as living and caught it for us that day also.

If I let him, Trevor would have a room full of all sorts of wonderful animals. While we were at the beach last year, Tom let the pet rabbit Trevor kept in his room out for an afternoon in the back yard. Somehow the rabbit ended up in the neighbor's yard where he has stayed. We occasionally spot him from our upstairs window. The rabbit is much happier and so are we, not having that barn yard smell wafting from Trevor's room.

With Riley, the doctor's wanted to know if we had any exotic pets. No birds or reptiles allowed. The diseases they can carry would be toxic for Riley. So, the mole is gone, but it is spring. Where there was one present there will be more coming. Riley will have a good story for the nurses today. I have to mop the kitchen floor and vacuum just in case.