house smells. love you.

This is a gross but accurate picture of how I believe all skunks should be-dead on the side of the road. Sounds harsh, but unless your milk carton smells like skunk then you have no room to judge.

Picture it: Sicily...(ha, just kidding! shout out to Sophia Patrillo!) No really, it's 5:30 in the morning the day we are leaving for Bham for The surgery and Gabbi gets sprayed by a skunk. In the face. My perfect, well behaved daughter. Now, unless you have had a skunk encounter personally then you were naive like me and thought that the smell just stayed on the dog and anything the skunk oil touched. Oh, it is a much better world to be a part of, a nice little paradise where skunk is not permanently in your nose, taste buds, hair, pantry, etc. Enjoy your stay there and I hope you never have to leave. Anyway, in the franticness of the morning where I had to be downtown to have blood taken for our new insurance by 7, we both had to finish packing & go to work and, just for fun, we threw a toddler in the mix...we had to put Gabs in her crate because we don't have a fence. Brandon (my perfect husband) had the worst part of giving her a 30 minute bath with an entire bottle of dog shampoo & a recipe of stuff I found online consisting of dishwashing detergent, hydrogen peroxide & baking soda. Again, naivete entered the picture as I thought that would fix it. Ha, ha. I came home later to get the girls to bring them to the kennel and BAM. Literally knocked down by the smell that implied an entire skunk family, including distant step cousins by marriage, had set up residence in my house. But, no. Just my one Gabs. I took them to the kennel where I said nonchalantly as I brought Chloe in first, "My German Shepherd might have a little skunk smell on her...I think it was in the air or something." Then I dropped Gabs off & literally ran out the door before the smell could sink in and they rejected her.
Now, keep in mind that Anderson & I literally never touched Gabs, but the second we walked into Mom's, she said, "What is that burning smell?" That would be your daughter & grandson. My jacket smelled so awful, just from hanging on the chair in the kitchen, that I had to borrow a very fashionable gingerbread man sweater from Mom. It was actually very warm & kind of smelled like her so it was comforting, too. When I got to school, people could literally smell me. Brandon sent me texts that said, "House smells.Love you." and "Everyone says I stink." Oh, fun times. Because all of her stuff smelled so bad when we got to Bham, we literally had to leave everything on the deck of Nicole's house. Seriously, we wore their clothes because ours had to be triple washed.

Elizabeth really put this into perspective for me when I overheard her chuckling as she walked past me the other day. When prompted, she said, "This would only happen to you." And, I think she is right. I guess I have to look at in a positive light that Anderson will definitely not have a boring childhood! The nose sucker stunk so much I had to soak it in a cup of vinegar. This was after it went through the dishwasher cycle 3 times. I can't just buy another one because it is the hospital one & the drugstore ones just aren't as good.

Scout had a baking soda bath.

The bug helping me sort through the "tolerable" clothes & the "they need a 4th washing" clothes.

Despite the fact that I had a very nice treatment for the suitcase consisting of hourly alternating Lysol spray, febreze & baking soda, the suitcase still reeked after 4 days so we left it on Nicole's deck. I found myself jealous of the people who get to live out of a suitcase as we were living out of a garbage bag.

Things that do NOT cure skunk smell: a bowl of vinegar in every room in the house, tomato sauce baths, 4 bottles of febreze, the fact that my son is having surgery and I really don't have time for this. Things that DO cure skunk: GG & Jpa!! Thank goodness that they took over skunk duty when we left or we would still be living out of a garbage bag. Toni went to our house & suffered through the skunk to pour more vinegar, spray more febreze & try to air out the house. Those methods did not cut it, so they had ServePro come & use some fancy oxygen machine. This meant that we couldn't stay in our house so we had a slumber party at their house, complete with dinner & Anderson watching the next day. It was a pretty nice set up, actually. The bug, because he is the most resilient thing ever, slept in 5 different places for 5 nights in a row due to 2 trips to Bham & the skunk. Seriously, my kid is going to have such life perspective by the time he is 2.

I recommend keeping a bottle around, just in case. It doesn't fix the smell because Gabbi still has a little aroma to her, but it does help. I have already had the joy of discovering that when it rains, the smell rises to the top or something because it is extra strong. Oh, joy.