Update from Wessyngton Road

Too busy to blog for the last couple of months - many posts written in my head (usually while walking the dog around the neighborhood, watching houses go up, silt in the rainwater in the gutter, or while getting updates about neighborhood Pest Control Issues) but none made it to keyboard - at least, not until now.

There is a new group that's been formed to support Morningside parks - the Morningside Parks Commission, Inc. There's a website and a Yahoo group, and the first project they have taken on is a toddler play area at Sidney Marcus Park. You may recall that the sandbox was closed last fall, eliminating a potential neighborhood source for toxoplasmosis exposure. The new group, headed by Natasha Moffitt and Scott Lenhart, is fundraising for a new toddler play area. Presumably the new play area will be Improved and Toxoplasmosis-Free. If you have a toddler, or used to have a toddler, or were ever a toddler yourself, please consider contributing; $75 gets you your very own engraved brick. According to the website, contributions are tax deductible.

Another neighborhood issue that needs attention is a familiar one, if you have read this blog before - that would be Rats. The news from the street is that The Rats are Back. Perhaps the recent rains have flooded them out of their winter quarters in someone's basement, or perhaps falling housing prices have made our street More Affordable - I'm not sure. Whatever the reason, they are back.

Angela had one in a cupboard in her house last week; it was captured and released in a Havahart trap. (Only Angela would do that. Most of us do not really have a heart when in comes to rats in our cupboards.) Then yesterday Tom saw it, or one of its friends or relatives, on our front porch in broad daylight. (Perhaps they prefer househunting by day.) So Tom put out the special, highly toxic Rat Treats in the special dispensers from Do It Yourself Pest Control. This worked amazingly well last time, and then the rats were invading our kitchen regularly. Hopefully this will keep them out of the house altogether.

But, like many other things, Rat Control is a Shared Responsibility. We all need to do our part. So our early summer block party is coming up at the end of the month; flyers should be going out soon, if they haven't already. Tom had wanted to have Trees Atlanta there or someone from the Georgia Urban Forestry Council to tell us why we should all plant trees. Trees are all well and good, but if the neighborhood is being overrun by Rats that seems to me to be a little more urgent. So maybe we should ask the guys from Do It Yourself Pest Control to come set up an exhibit.

More about Head Lice

We got the dreaded letter from the school a couple weeks ago. It wasn't the most dreaded letter ("Your child is infested with head lice") but it was the second most dreaded one ("A child in your child's class is infested with head lice"). Iain's hair is pretty long, and we've told him if he gets head lice we are going to cut it really short. I personally do not believe that this constitutes child abuse, but I'm not sure that that's how Iain sees it.

I got out the industrial strength lice comb, which we haven't used since the girls were much younger, and combed him out thoroughly. No bugs, living or dead, but I did find a couple of bits of blue-green stuff that Iain identified as duct tape. ("How did you get duct tape in your hair?") We are still on Level Orange alert, but hopefully have dodged the bullet (or the bugs) this time.

I know everyone has been anxiously awaiting an update on the head lice committee. I couldn't make it to the meeting (it probably conflicted with some other meeting I had to go to), but I have reviewed and commented on the proposed new policy - and we just got the word that it has been approved.

The new policy requires parents to sign something that says they have treated their child before their child can return to school. We hope this will help. We shall see.

Coffee with the Principal

Tom and I went to the coffee with the principal at Morningside Elementary this morning. The big news is that Becky is expecting the new school zones to be posted on the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) website today -- or if not today, no later than Tuesday. Because of growth in enrollment at Morningside and other nearby elementary schools, a new school is being built on Ponce de Leon, where the Morningside kindergarten campus currently is. She said that she expects that APS will convene a Community Meeting about three weeks after the new school zones are released, and then after getting that public input APS will develop a final proposal that will go to the school board for a vote.

She also said that a new assistant principal has been selected, but is awaiting final approval by the school board. The new person is expected to start September 9.

Lots of discussion about air conditioning (an ongoing problem in a few classrooms), strep (should announcements go out if there are strep cases at school?), but the big topic was head lice.

I never had any experience with head lice until I had kids in elementary school. I will never forget that first time I washed the girls heads with RID® and as I rinsed their hair, the dead bugs came streaming out. It was one of those unforgettable moments as a parent, when you realize that your beloved children have been infested with bloodsucking insects for God knows how long and you didn't even know it. And at that point you don't even realize that you don't just do this once. Head lice is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

Contrary to popular belief, there are actually six stages that parents go through, when they learn that their child has head lice. The first five - denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance - are well-known. The sixth one - humor - is highly recommended. Tom thinks that part of the reason they like him so much at the pediatrician's office is that the message he left on the Nurse's Hotline when the girls got head lice that first time included that we were all seriously considering becoming Hare Krishnas and shaving our heads. I have to say that at least based on this meeting this morning very few Morningside Elementary parents have reached this higher, transcental level.

Here's the deal. Head lice are not a health problem. They are a nuisance, but nobody gets rheumatic heart disease as a consequence of head lice infestation. In contrast, that can happen (although it is not common) following strep infections of the throat, so a little perspective is in order here. In a 2002 clinical practice article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Richard Roberts wrote, "In 1998, half the school nurses in the United States would not allow a child with nits back into school. Excluding children from school because of head lice results in anxiety, fear, social stigma, overtreatment, loss of education, and economic loss if parents miss work -- a classic case of the cure being worse than the disease. Management should not harm the patient more than the pest."

I did volunteer for the head lice committee (why, I don't know. Maybe I thought I would run out of things to write about otherwise.) So more to follow, I am sure.

ADDENDUM: As of August 30 no information on the new school zones on the APS website that I could find, but according to yesterday's Digital Dolphin it should be available at http://www.atlanta.k12.ga.us/content/apsrezoning.aspx by no later than September 2. No doubt more to follow on this story as well. It is at least as important as head lice, but maybe not as important as streptococcal infection (at least not the kind that is associated with rheumatic fever).

Rats!

Honestly, I didn't start this blog to only write about pest control, but this follows logically from the first posting about the possum in the living room.

A week or two ago we were having dinner with David and Alka, and they mentioned driving by a place "that sounded really scary" - and we recognized it right away as one of Tom's favorites - "Do-It-Yourself Pest Control" (that really is the name of it - it's on Chamblee Tucker Road).

There is - let us be frank here - a rat issue in the neighborhood. We used to have a cat, but then we got the dog and the cat moved next door to live with Kathy and Steve, who did not have a dog, and then later the cat died. So we no longer have an effective natural predator of small rodents patrolling the perimeter of our house. At around the same time a house on an adjacent street (not Wessyngton Road) was knocked down to make way for a Large House that is Architecturally Dissimilar from Adjacent Houses (LHADAH). The neighborhood rumor is that the house that was knocked down was infested with rats. So the rats, now homeless, went Searching for New Homes and some of them decided that they wanted to live at our house.

Now it's not that we didn't already have rats - we did. Sarah has two rats that live in a cage in the upstairs bathroom. (Actually for several days one of them was living behind the washing machine, but that's another story.) But these are actual pet rats, obtained from people who make you wash your hands before you handle rats as opposed to washing them after you handle them, not the more independent ones who are accustomed to making their own way in the world.

So Tom went to visit the guys at Do-It-Yourself Pest Control, and got some traps. We never caught a rat in the traps, and as the nocturnal visitations went on there seemed some danger that the rats would get comfortable, move in, bring their friends, and generally not be good neighbors - and perhaps even chew through the insulation on some wire and burn the house down. So we knew we needed to move on to more desperate measures - either getting another cat (who might not distinguish between the various rats potentially available for catching) or poison. The guys at Do-It-Yourself didn't have cats but they did talk to Tom about poison, and I have to say the results were pretty stunning.

The poison looks like azalea food but comes in big chunks which are put in the same black plastic boxes that housed the traps. We lost a couple of the boxes (raccoons, we are guessing) but have seen no non-resident rats in the house since Tom put the poison out.

Of course rat control is most effective if implemented at the neighborhood level. We have a couple of LHADAHs on our street, one of which is under construction, and one of which is completed and currently for sale. Anyone who is thinking about paying $1.3M for a house....well, don't you think they should know? Full disclosure and all.

Possum Fritters

Sunday night when Tom and I got back from walking the dog, we found Sarah standing on the chair in front of the computer in the living room. (Since this chair has wheels on it, this seemed like a particularly bad idea.) She thought she had seen a small gray animal make its way across the living room toward her - perhaps a rat, maybe a possum. Bullwinkle, the black lab, was not going to be helpful so I put him in his crate in the other room even though he was wet from the rain, and Tom and the girls started looking for the small gray animal.

It seemed most likely that it was behind the sofa (this would be the sofa that I bought when I was an intern that has been subsequently been destroyed by the cumulative effect of multiple moving companies, three children, and especially the aforementioned Labrador retriever), so Tom looked behind it and didn't see it at first. I went to return Bullwinkle's second blanket (since he was wet) to his crate, but once I opened the door he was out, and the hall door wasn't closed, so Bullwinkle was back in the living room. In the meantime, Tom had spotted it but with the dog back in the room no telling where it had gone.

We turned the sofa over (no animal) but ultimately got it under a blanket and then into a wire wastebasket. It was a young possum, doing its best to look fierce, with its mouth open and hair on end (I told Sarah it had spiky hair like hers). Tom carried it - wastebasket and all - up the street to the church where he let it loose - hopefully far enough away it would not make its way back to our house.

When the kids ask what's for dinner, or what some unfamilar food is on the table, Tom often answers "possum fritters." We had our chance, but no possum fritters tonight.