My life would be perfect if only...

Oh.my.gah. My son threw up in the car tonight. He was sitting in the third row and he threw up. Could he have wedged himself into a more hard to get to place? This is something that I really didn't want to ever have to deal with.

When things like this happen, I call them "my life would be perfect if..." moments. I get them a lot. Sometimes it's as simple as "if I hadn't stumped my toe", or "I didn't have to stop for gas". But sometimes it's something a little more substantial. I give you, "The Rat Incident".

When Jack was about 6 weeks old, and I had gotten about 4 hrs of consecutive sleep and was feeling pretty good, I decided to surprise Bob by throwing out the trash. I put my precious newborn in his little swing so he could watch a Baby Einstein video. I opened the garage door, and I saw a rat the size of a baby kangaroo run away from me. When this happened, I screamed and ran into the bedroom where my exhausted from staying up with the baby husband was blissfully sleeping. I ran right past my innocent, defenseless baby boy, and jumped onto the bed screaming. All I could get out was "rat!" and he knew what was happening. I'm terrified of rats, mice, etc. He jumped out of bed, asking me where the baby was, and my first thought was "the rat will eat my baby!" He ran through the house towards the kitchen, then he ran back into the living room and said "the door is open, the door to the house is open, you left it open!" I guess I didn't shut the door completely in my panic. For all we knew that rat was in our house!

My sister once told me, "that rat is more afraid of you than you are of it". I told her that wasn't possible or that rat would have dropped dead the minute I opened that door. Either that or I would have been cleaning up rat poop for a month because I nearly wet myself when I saw that bastard rat running away from me.

Later that evening, my sweet, brave husband decided to do some laundry. I told him I wasn't doing it, and at this time I was doing about 3 loads a day because Jack was a spitter. So my hero, puts on jeans, tucks them into some boots, and wears a long sleeved shirt. Then he proceeded to enter the garage carrying a sword that was as tall as the door (I wish I was kidding, I really do). I wasn't sure what he thought he would do with it, but I was sure I wasn't going to go in there so if he needed to put on a dress that was cool with me. This is how we did laundry for about two weeks. During that two weeks, we had put out some poison. That rat would take the poison, but it would leave something in it's place. Like a red pen cap. It made me even more skeeved out because I always took comfort in the fact that rodents are dumb. But if it was smart enough to think I might believe that a red pen cap was a piece of that poison than I was underestimating it. Finally one day, Bob found the rat dead. I had told him how big this rat was, and his fear was based solely on that thing being the size of a 6 week old St. Bernard puppy. He came around the front of the house with the giant rat in a pizza box. It was about the size of my fist. But it's tail was as long as my arm and that's even worse. In fact, I'm not 100% sure that it was a rat, it might have been the neighbors guinea pig, but either way it didn't belong in my garage. If it was a guinea pig that would explain why it was smart enough to leave a red pen cap when it took the poison. So maybe rodents are dumb after all.

During that two week period, everytime I thought about that filthy thing being in my garage, I would say "my life would be perfect if that bastard rat wasn't in my garage". And this is what I thought as I was cleaning up that 3rd row seat after Jack tossed his lunch. My life would be perfect if he hadn't thrown up in the car.

Now my life would be perfect if I didn't think I was going to be the next to blow.