ratter.

justin is out of town until tomorrow night for work.  he doesn't travel for work very often, and for that i am grateful, especially during the last few months of pregnancy, where bending down to bathe the toddler or pick up discarded stickers becomes infinitely more daunting.  i do enjoy his infrequent absences a little bit, though, as they afford me the opportunity to take leisurely baths and read for however long i want and let etta curl up next to me in bed.  not that i can't do those things with him around, but i like talking to him too much, so i tend to favor that over retreating inward after big smalls goes to bed. 
anyway.  last night, i got ek down, cleaned the kitchen, took a nice bath, and was reading on the couch around 9:15 or so, when i heard intense dog scrambling on the deck.  i got up to see what the fuss was about, and i could tell that they had cornered something.  concerned that it was the neighbors aging cat, i tapped on the door to distract them for a second so i could get a glimpse.  what i saw was a gigantic, likely-dead rat. 
i called the pups inside (i didn't want them eating/further mutilating said rat and making themselves sick) and called my parents (justin was still at dinner).  my dad answered and offered the following suggestions:

• put the rat in three garbage bags with an entire box of baking soda.  place bag(s) of rat in freezer until trash day.
• go outside with shovel and gloves.  scoop up rat and deposit behind fence in creek area.  
• call neighbor or nearby friend to come handle situation.  

needless to say, i almost died laughing at all of these suggestions.  the first is an on-going joke in our house because my dad does not like stinky garbage (who does, really?  but c'mon.), so he is famous for bagging the odious garbage (shrimp shells, chicken carcasses, etc.) and placing it in the freezer.  while i understand the logic behind this idea (as i told dad last night), i forget about this weird smelly bag in the freezer.  so, in the grand scheme, i would much rather deal with stinky garbage for 2 days than with finding a rat carcass in my freezer in 4 months that i've completely forgotten about.   i know this is a possibility because i revisited the remains of our thanksgiving turkey in march or april of one year and it was traumatic. 
anyway.  dad's rebuttal to my carcass-in-the-freezer conundrum was that he sets an alarm on his phone calendar to remind him to remove said carcass on trash day.  i told him i was pretty sure he's the only person in the known world that uses his phone for this particular reminder.  hilarious. 
the other ideas were appreciated, but i was imagining my super pregnant, pajama-clad self sneaking through our dark backyard in the late evening to deal with this rat and the rat springing back to life and scaring me into a fall or worse.  i do not relish the idea of myself as a barefooted upside-down turtle in my own backyard, with no one nearby to help.  and, of course, i have far too much pride to call someone to help. 
so.  i did what i am pretty sure any and every other reasonably-minded person in my situation would do.  i left the rat on the deck.  went to sleep.  and dealt with him in the morning, in the light, whereby i scooped him up with a shovel and sent him to his final resting place in the creek behind our fence.  i captured a picture of him, though i'm not sure it does justice for his gargantuan size.  this sucker was nearly the length of my forearm.  and i felt bad for him, in some twisted overwhelmingly sensitive way...but this is the circle of life, right?