Little House of Horrors

Our lovely little apartment became a Haz-Mat scene this week. The building people have been doing work on the apartment directly above us for over a week now. During the days, they have been putting down new tile --hammer, hammer, hammer all day. It's been pretty maddening. I guess they're all done now and Tuesday evening they decided to spray the apartment with pesticides. Then the workers closed up the apartment and left for the day.

Shortly after that, our house filled with toxic fumes from the pesticides they used as they made their way down through the ventilation system and were blown directly into our house by the A/C. Great!

A couple of months ago, a family of four here in Bahrain was exposed to pesticides through their apartment's pest control service. The parents of the family ended up in the hospital, nearly dying. Sadly, their two sons (somewhere between 8 and 12 years of age) died from the exposure. With this tragedy in mind, Shawn and I decided that we would have to go to a hotel for the eveing and let our apartment air out.

When we got there, poor Quinn grabbed an unsturdy chair and toppled it over on her head in the blink of an eye. You can see in the picture above Quinn's Injury of the Week. She cut her eyelid and ripped out about 20 eyelashes.

After we had already settled the kids into bed and got ready to go to sleep, we discovered that our hotel beds were really just box springs on a nice bed frame. It was truly bizarre, as the rest of the hotel suite was very nice! Shawn and I were joking about the bed and how hard it was. Shawn said there was NO WAY he could sleep on that. Fast forward 5 minutes and Shawn is snoring loudly while I toss and turn, trying to find a position that does not feel like I'm having my circulation cut off. It was a restless night....for just me.

The next day, Halloween, our apartment still had a very faint residual pesticide smell, so Shawn complained to our building management. They opened up the apartment upstairs and ventilated it. I guess they didn't even think that it might cause problems for us! A few hours later, the house was clear and we were able to move back in. That was our Happy Halloween Little House of Horrors story, complete with a dangerous house, blood-curdling screams (from Quinn), toxic chemicals, an overpriced hotel, and a sleepless night.