Life in all forms

I’m sitting here in the dark watching a mouse run around and nibble the rice that fell from our dining room table at dinner.

Mike was sick today and I heated up some water and made some Top Ramen per his request. When I poured the steaming soup into a bowl I noticed there were about 20 ants that also made it into the soup. I picked out half and he ate the rest.

I drank a glass of water with a few gnats in it. I do that a lot.

My kids were playing on our back porch yesterday and found a baby snake, it was black.

I was sitting on the couch and a lizard that lives in our curtains pooped from above and it landed on my shoulder.

I can identify a piece of gecko poop from a piece of rat poop from a piece of bat poop.

Each night at bedtime the girls and I look for “gecks” to crawl across the ceiling so we can say goodnight. (a gecko)

Our neighbors kids line up Magnatiles into a sort of track and race millipedes through them.

We like watching them crawl on our mosquito nets because you can see all their legs move together like a crashing wave in an ocean.

Our dog likes to grab blue-headed lizards and chew them up. Like a live dog toy.

There are a few great blue turacos living in our tree outside. Tonight Boston’s “low” at dinner was that he hasn’t seen them in a while and he wonders where they went.

I packed my bag for my shift at the hospital and unknowingly packed a fire skink in there too.

We’ve learned that the best way to get your child to stop crying after they step on a spikey caterpillar is to put duct tape where the spikes are, press firmly, and pull them out that way. Mike is a genius.

I’m brainstorming this list by looking around my house and thinking about what we’ve encountered here recently.

There’s an insect in the trees that sometimes is SO LOUD that when I first came I couldn’t concentrate on what people were saying when it was making noise. Now I barely notice it at all.

I’ve trained my children since they were young not to be afraid of spiders. I’d say “The Forrest family is NOT afraid of spiders!”. I’m glad I did that but there was a black hairy spider in Winnie’s bed the size of my hand and it was the first time she’s heard me scream about an insect. All those years may have just been wiped away. It took 30 minutes, lights on, room torn apart to find that thing. And it was too fast for me to catch, I had to get our friend Joshua to kill it.

There are so many butterflies that I keep hitting them when I drive.

One time, Mike was driving and a gecko fell from the sky and held onto our windshield for a ride. Somehow he caught it on video and I watched it on replay and couldn’t stop laughing. For your viewing pleasure:

That mouse keeps running around the house as I type this. He’s a little too confidant for my liking.

We found a nest of baby rats in a piece of furniture we left in our driveway, they were pink and the size of marbles. They got tossed in a brush pile and I couldn’t look the mother in the eye when she ran past me.

When we left town our friend Robinah came and cleaned our house and she found a black snake under our fridge. She screamed and ran out. A bunch of guys came and killed it. She didn’t come back in until we got home.

Sometimes I can’t write on my computer at night because too many minute bugs swarm my screen. They can fit through a mosquito net. I’m still confused a little by how they do this.

I’m so used to bugs now that if a few are in my blender when I’m making a smoothie I just blend them up.

If we leave our porch light on at night we can wake up to some amazing moths on our screen doors.

You have to clean your indoor window sills once a week because gecko poop builds up there. Gecko poop has a white dot on the end of it.

There are so many kinds of ants here. You should ask my kids all about them. They know way more than I do.

The ants also are very fast and able to get into everything. You can’t hide Easter eggs for long.

It’s wise to shake out cushions before you sit down, you never know what’s under them.

Lizards like to chase each other in pairs.

I’m listening to some squeaky chirping noises in our attic that are there every night that I still can’t identify. I think bats, but don’t actually believe we have bats living up there.

There aren’t as many mosquitos as I thought there would be, but I can tell which are the kind that transmit malaria. They are bigger and have long legs. I just killed one before starting to write this.

Our dog had to have 30 mango flies extracted out of him. You don't want to see the video of it (or if you do let me know).

Somehow we are used to all of this.

The ants are the most annoying thing out of everything on this list and the snakes are the scariest. My kids would probably say the spikey caterpillars are the scariest. I keep telling them to wear shoes but they’re living the jungle life now.

When you wake up in the morning all you hear are birds. It’s beautiful.

When you go to bed all you hear are insects. It’s comforting.

Americans shoo flies away, even if its just one. Ugandans don’t even notice them.

There are invisible biting insects that come out at dusk and dawn called obakakuni. They are harmless, but their bites really itch, so we wear long sleeves. I take it back. These may be more annoying than ants.

After we buy flour and sugar we freeze it for 24 hours to kill any weevils.

These critters can translate into free entertainment for children. Or nightmares. Depending on the child and the day. But overall, my family's bug tolerance level has shot through the roof.

This list is not exhaustive by any means, but please still come and visit! Ha!