Termites!

Eeeeewwww! We noticed these about a week and a half ago under our back door:

What are they?, you ask. Mud tunnels built by termites to provide shelter as they travel from their home in the dirt below, up to get some food in OUR home above. Luckily we have neighbors who have had termites (not so lucky for them, I guess), otherwise I wouldn't have even known what the mud tunnels meant. So I'm thinking we caught it pretty early. We had 3 companies come out to do inspections last week and give us estimates, and as far as they could tell, they were only in the one wall.

So today we embark on the adventure of killing them all off. The guy is here right now drilling all around our house to put stuff in the dirt to kill the little buggers. Then he'll come inside and treat the wood. So we have the priviledge of spending 6 hours in our house (I have to be here the whole time) with all of the furniture pushed to the center of the rooms to allow access to the walls:

As you can imagine, all of our baby-proofing has been undone and now no place is really safe to let Rachel play on her own, which may make for a fun day for me. ;) My parents both have started back to work now that the school year has begun, so my days of being spoiled having babysitters any time any day are over. Almost. Luckily they both have semi-flexible schedules, so today my dad is actually going to take Rachel for a few hours so she isn't stuck in this house where she's not allowed to play anywhere except for the bathrooms. So nice. And hopefully in less than 6 hours our house will be termite-free.