Hallelujah!!!!! We got keys! We have an address! The Styles have left the (Happy Hotel Home) building!!

Enjoyed my morning coffee with our Rosie in the backyard yesterday, listening to birds, looking at trees!! Remarkable change of scene after three months of concrete jungle. Very thankful for this! Watched a bunch of Robins eating worms voraciously out of the lawn, fuelling up for their long trek back to Canada – noticed this one day in the little garden outside the hotel last week too! So neat to see the very birds whose arrival has always heralded Spring in the north, marking the beginning of Spring here by their leaving. We have a lovely flowering tree that is just coming into bloom – there are a few trees that have lost many leaves and are just starting their spring bloom again – very nice! The federal reserve ravine behind us is very dry and brown right now but should be lovely and green when the rainy season starts in May.

We’ve been busy cleaning and setting up. The house had been empty for a while before we moved in and in the meantime the landlord had done some renovation and upgrading. Yesterday (day 2) we ventured out to run some errands then cleaned floors and surfaces of much accumulated, post-construction dust – felt good! We’re getting used to all the new sounds in the house and community and constant security surveillance. There are fireworks throughout the day and night announcing pilgrimages to the Basilica Guadalupe (there are more than usual this week with Easter approaching). Rosie is having some trouble dealing with this part of our new reality! (She’s never been a fan of the loud firework “kaboom!!!”)

A very different way of living!

For our first movie night (have I already mentioned that this was only day 2 in the house?) we watched “The Avengers” which felt like the longest movie ever as I was SO tired! It finally ends and I’m tucking each of the kids in and when I finally get to Hudson he is already asleep. I am turning off his light when I hear Rosie’s nails clicking on the stone floors downstairs. I think maybe she is eating or getting a drink, but as I listen some more I notice that there is no consistent pattern to her clicking as would be expected if she was padding across the room to her bowl…almost sounds like she’s scuffling with something. I head towards my room and I hear Mansell call out,”Mom, I need help… Mom!!” He’s at the top of the stairs in seconds, intersecting my path. He is totally panicked. “Rosie found something…it’s black, it has a long tail and long pincers out the front. It’s tail is up…” Are you KIDDING me!?! I have a horrible sinking feeling that it might BE what it sounds like it is… We head downstairs toward his room, walk through the door and OMG, there in the middle of his floor is a SCORPION!!!!! It’s about 2 inches long and is clicking fast toward a safer corner. My stomach lurches and Mansell climbs higher onto a bench. He’s shaking and shivering, surely in shock. We scream every time it moves. It’s SO nasty!! It’s almost 12:30 a.m. I am on my hands and knees watching it’s every move tucked under Mansell’s night table. Time to Google what to do when a scorpion is in your house in the wee hours and your kids, who are now ALL up and hysterical, are bawling and imploring you to DO something!?! Funny, nothing comes up when you enter those keywords!!!  Enjoying (?) another “NEVER in a million years did I EVER think I’d be dealing with this” moment. I don’t know if it’s aggressive and would strike me if I got too close.  I know NOTHING about scorpions, save all the horrible depictions of them in movies, which wasn’t helping in that moment.  Mansell is freaking out because he read somewhere that the smaller and blacker the scorpion the “deadlier”and the “more poisonous.” Awesome. Do I trap it? Do I squish it? It has an exoskeleton so I’m going to have to have a good, strong sure-shot if I’m going to squash it. It wedges itself further into the corner under Mansell’s night table. Caleigh shows up with a soup ladle for me in one hand and a metal spatula in the other for her own protection. She’s bawling and Hudson is tucked in behind her shaking. I wish I could say I was perfectly composed through all this, but I was not and all the profanity introduced in moments of stress by Daddy’s tendency to swear were certainly reinforced by Mommy in this moment! I was in shock that we had to deal with this at all!! When this really ugly bug finally made a break for it, I lunged, grabbed the night table and slammed it against the wall a few times. Success! “Is it dead?” Mansell’s uncharacteristically quiet voice wonders. It’s been playing dead throughout this ordeal, so, having NEVER killed a bug like this before, I picked up the soup ladle and administered one last hard wallop for good measure. Definitely dead. I struggled to put it in a jar (really made me feel nauseous just looking at it!) in case I needed to show it to someone… I sit on Mansell’s bed, stunned and glad that’s over… Then from the top of the stairs Caleigh shrieks, “Mom!! Hudson needs you… Hurry!!” I run up the stairs into my room where the kids are, and find that Hudson HAS indeed vomitted all over my floor, big time…he tends to do that when stressed…it’s now nearly 2:00 a.m. There is no way these kids are going back to their own beds after all that. I’m not sleeping with three kids in with me and an edge of the bed to balance on, so I start researching next steps for scorpion management!!! Aaahhh!! I was so ready to bail on all of this after that!

But then I learned that it is not uncommon to get the ocassional scorpion house guest in this part of the world – in fact all of the America’s excluding Canada have scorpions. There is one exception in Canada even, in an area of the Okanagan Valley where it enjoys a very desert-like climate – even there, there are scorpions. The ones that make midnight house calls  are NOT poisonous to humans, and deliver a sting that is no more intense than a wasp or a bee. That said, it is still recommended to go to hospital if stung in case of allergic reaction to the venom – the hospitals in Mexico City keep the anti-venom stocked for use in these cases. I learned that they don’t like Lavender, so guess what’s going in my garden? We rolled towels and put them at the base of the outside doors tonight. We learned that we have to shake out our shoes before putting them on, and to glance at the sink each morning before sticking our hands in. We will spray repellent around the perimeter of the house.  We are waging war!  We likely disturbed their cozy spots with all of our cleaning (they like dark, damp spots), but too bad – they are not welcome here. We will get an insecticide spray as well for in the moment spot-jobs (would have been far more civilized to spray the heck out of the sucker rather than throw furniture around – but a Momma Bear has got to do what a Momma Bear’s gotta do!) Was I happy to have to discover more than I ever wanted to know about scorpions? Not at all. I was glad to learn however that the varieties found where we live are relatively harmless, and that they only ocassionaly get into the house.

Let the fun begin!