The Miracle of the Millipedes!

I want to take a minute today and record one of the Lord's recent tender mercies in our life. Now, as I relate this story, some of you may wonder how the heck this is a tender mercy, but just hear me out until the end. Okay, so here's the story. About a week and a half before we left on our two week trip back to Utah, I started to find millipedes in our house. Now sometimes I would find them here or there, but strangely, they started to appear most frequently under Emma's pillow. Yes, you read that right--under her pillow! Talk about creepy and gross. Every time I would pick up her pillow in the morning to make her bed a little black worm would be curled up underneath it. After a few days of this, I started to wig out. Where the hack were they all coming from? As the day to wash the sheets arrived, another even more horrifying event took place. I took the sheets off to find tons of the little black worms underneath her sheets. This about sent me over the edge. I picked her mattress up and moved her bed to find hundreds of the disgusting little creatures nesting right under her bed and all along the wall. I about threw up right then and there. I shooed all of the kids out of the bedroom and barricaded the door until Nick got home. Then, once he saw the nest, we both started into sheer panic. What on earth were we going to do? By this time, we were supposed to be leaving for our trip in just three days. How could we possibly deal with this disaster? Did we call an exterminator, or try to spray ourselves? And why were they coming into our house? After doing a little bit of research, the best answer to that question seemed to be moisture. But, that seemed like an equally awful answer. Was our house somehow leaking? We had to get answers to these questions and solutions to these problems fast. So, on Nick's last day off before the trip, the day we were supposed to get all packed, we set out to solve the millipede problem. After much consideration, we did determine that the house was leaking. The downspout right outside Emma's window had broken off, sending all of the rainwater straight into the ground right along the wall where her bed lay. In addition, all of the caulking on the window was destroyed creating a perfect entryway for the gross little worms. The solution was thus three-fold: fix the downspout, re-caulk, and spray like the dickens. This took all day, and actually forced us to delay our trip a day so that we could get packed; but, it proved to be a blessing in disguise. How, you might ask? Well, while we were gone, Rochester got record rainfall, and lots of our friends had flooding in their basements, not to mention flash flooding all over town. The highways were closed coming in and out of Rochester, and it was a major city crisis. When we got home from our trip, and found that the millipedes were thankfully all gone, we realized a surprising truth. Had we not found the millipedes, we wouldn't have noticed the broken downspout, or discovered the poor caulking job on Emma's window. Without these repairs, our basement would have surely had severe water damage. And such damage left for weeks could have been more than disastrous. So, the night we got home, we prayed together as a family and thanked the Lord for the millipedes. Funny how the Lord works sometimes. After all, who would consider a millipede nest under your toddler's bed as a tender mercy!