Babies, babies, babies!!!

Ok, ok, hold your horses! It’s not what you think, not even remotely! Typically when people hear the word, “baby” they get all giddy and excited. That was not my reaction when I heard that word. Let’s play a little game. What do you get when you mix the smell of sulfur with a skunk? I actually can’t answer that question. My response would lack the justice that this rancid smell deserves. So yep, you guessed it, we have skunks! YAY!!! In the middle of the night last Thursday (March 4th) I woke up to a nasty smell. At first I didn’t know if it was Bryan, or something else. Friday morning we woke up and the smell was still there. We began cleaning the house and I feared finding a dead animal in a cupboard, corner, or behind a couch. After cleaning the house we headed out to the airport to pick up Amanda and Martha, who were visiting this past weekend. Upon getting in the car Amanda stated, “It smells like a skunk!” Apparently the odor stuck to our clothes and soaked into the car seats. When we welcomed the family into our home, they were expecting our sulfur scented house, but the smell that hit them was even worse! The smell would come and go and we weren’t 100% sure what exactly the smell was. It could be a dead animal, it could be a skunk. We found little holes around the outside of the house, but we couldn’t find the source of the stink. They endured the smell for the rest of the weekend, but after they left the smell began to get worse.

Around midnight Tuesday night, I felt Bryan poking me. I woke up and both of us were suffocated by the awful stench. He left for work at 5:30am (the usual) and I received a text message at 6:20am saying, “Everyone at the office thinks I smell like a skunk.” Needless to say, the skunk smell started to overpower the sulfur smell. Bryan was evidently let off work early to “take care of the skunk problem at home.” I think it was because they just wanted him out of the office. About an hour before he got off work, I decided to walk around the house and see if I could find anything. It didn’t take long for me to find a skunk, dying at the bottom of our front porch steps. It was dead by 8 o’clock last night and we left it out there since the pest control guy came this morning. Which leads me to babies. Upon searching around the outside of the house for holes, the pest control guy made the statement to me that it was the end of mating season and a lot of times the male skunks get in fights and let off their wonderful smell in the process. He then said those dreadful words, “I think you have a female skunk under there, she is probably pregnant and the babies should be born in about a week.” Baby skunks? Are you kidding me? More? It gets even better as he proceeded to tell me that the mother won’t leave her hiding spot under our house until after she has the babies, and the babies won’t leave until they are old enough to go out on their own, which will be around June. He also enticed me with the lovely fact that baby skunks don’t know how to control when they release their stink. So basically, we will have stinky, baby skunks wandering around underneath our house until we leave. Our house smells better everyday!