If you're anything like me, you will immediately scroll downso that you won't have to look at this picture.
Am I right?
Craig took Bentley camping last night for the ward's annual Father-Son Campout. Bentley was ecstatic over the whole thing and looked forward to it all week. The morning of, when he blessed his breakfast, he mentioned in his prayer to "please help us to sleep while we're camping, just me and my dad." (Yes, sleeping well is the one thing my kids always remember to ask for in their prayers. They learned this from me. My kids not waking me up in the night is very important to me!) An hour before they left, Craig and I presented Bentley with a new Lightning McQueen sleeping bag. He was pretty much as happy as I've ever seen him. This was right up there with Disney World for him.
So, well stocked with hotdogs and s'mores ingredients, Bentley and Daddy headed out. Kendra and I stayed home and painted our toenails, ate macaroni and cheese (I should have made two boxes-- that girl can eat!) and watched Cinderella together. That's about as girly as I get. Then after I put Kendra to bed, I made ice cream and watched Chicago. Much more my style! I ate way too much junk food and nearly threw it all back up again at three in the morning. Oops. I guess Lucky would prefer it if I ate healthier. Which is why tonight I'm planning on only eating ice cream-- no chips and no frosting-covered graham crackers!
Anyway, the next morning Craig and Bentley returned, smelling of smoke, but otherwise quite happy. Kendra was very excited (or as she says, "assighted") to show off her toenails to Daddy and Bentley. I threw all their clothes in the wash and Craig decided we should give the kids baths both because they needed them, but also to check for ticks. It's a good thing Craig is from the east coast, because that never would have occurred to me.
And of course, right at the end of bathtime, we discovered a small brownish-reddish speck on Bentley's neck which I pulled off with my bare fingers, only to realize that I now had a TICK ON MY THUMB, at which point I ran shrieking from the room. I'm not sure which made me freak out more: the fact that my little boy had had a tick on him or the fact that it was now on me. But trust me, I'm not lying about the shrieking. Craig managed to calmly seal the tick up in a plastic bag (he thinks we might want it in case Bentley develops a rash-- no idea if that's true or not, but in the meantime, we seem to have obtained a pet tick). I obsessively washed my hands and eventually calmed down enough to get Bentley and Kendra dressed. Poor Bentley was pretty upset by the whole thing, mostly because it involved me digging at his neck-- where he is incredibly ticklish (ugh. no pun intended!!!)-- with my fingernails. Poor guy.
Anyway, our internet research says that unless the tick has really embedded itself (and it needs several days to do that), there shouldn't be any risk for Lyme disease, but to keep an eye on the spot just in case. Having read about Amy Tan's advanced-stage Lyme disease (in her excellent collection of essays, The Opposite of Fate), I have to admit that the mere possibility of this happening to my son terrifies me. So I will be checking his neck religiously now.
The worst part about all this (assuming, as I'm doing, that Bentley will be just fine,) is that it brings so many fears-- fears that are normally dormant-- crashing down on me. I'm already pretty scared of bugs, but have gradually been toughening myself up to them. I barely flinch when I have to kill a silverfish or a spider now.* (Crickets continue to be a different matter; dang, those give me the willies.) But this lands me right back at square one in that department. All bugs are shudder-worthy again. And before I know it, the whole east coast begins to seem frightening: ticks! Poison ivy! Poison oak! Hurricanes! Tornadoes! Where does it all end??? The only scary thing we had in Seattle was the occasional blow-out from Mt. St. Helens, but even that's only happened twice in my lifetime (and the second time was no big deal). I guess we have stinging nettles, but those really don't compare to poison ivy... I'm sure we've got ants somewhere, but I can't remember EVER seeing one inside my house. I guess Seattle has more than its fair share of crazy politicians, but those same guys spend a fair amount of time right here in DC, so I haven't managed to distance myself from them very much.
Anyway. I love it here. I really do. I love my home, I love my friends, I love having my in-laws nearby. I love our backyard. I love that Craig is employed (which is seeming like more and more of a blessing every day that the economy continues to suck.). I love the cardinals and the fireflies and the cicadas. I love all the museums that are so close by that I never bother to go, but I know that I can whenever I want to. I love a lot of things here.
But isn't it a bit... dangerous?
*In this context, yes, spiders count as bugs. Anything with too many legs that crawls inside my house so that I have to kill it falls under the very general and not scientific category of "bugs."
11 comments:
Okay, so I realized last night that I was wrong about one thing here: there ARE ticks on the west coast, but they don't carry Lyme disease, so while they're still creepy, they aren't deadly at least.
Craig read this and pointed out that we've had trees fall on our house in Seattle at least three times, so perhaps that was rather dangerous, too. It's a good point, but I've never had nightmares about trees...
We got our first tick a few weeks ago at Great Falls NP (Will's neck). When we moved to Kansas from my childhood full of non-scary bugs in California, I wouldn't let the kids play outside forever because the bugs were HUGE and so scary. And I'd hear story about people going camping and coming back with 7 or 8 ticks. Somehow we never got any in Kansas. My big fear here is house centipedes... those things seriously freak me out.
Nancy, I am TOTALLY with you on the house centipedes. Before I knew their name, I called them devil bugs because I found them so creepy and upsetting. We used to get them every so often in our apartment. It was enough to make me constantly check the ceilings before I entered a room (for some reason the centipedes and the silverfish both liked to be on the ceiling). Eventually it got so bad that Bentley would stare at the ceiling every time he walked into a room, too! I haven't had one in my house so far (BIG knock on wood).
Oh, I sooooo hear you. Sam came home from fathers & sons with two ticks and I had one the weekend before. I cried. Sam couldn't have cared less. I swear we are not leaving the house all summer. I'm so disgusted.
Here, here on the house centipedes, too! Sometimes I like to wonder about God sitting down and designing these miserable creatures. Why?
Uh, I don't remember any tornadoes on the East Coast. Hurricanes are rare up in the NJ area - have you guys really ever been affected by them down there in VA? And no mudslides like in California. Bugs are definitely around, but I don't consider them to be as bad as some other places have it. There are a ton more small annoying bugs around in the midwest it seems and I can definitely never live anywhere that has huge cockroaches. Nasty, nasty, nasty. Even the occasional small one in VA creeped me out because we just didn't have that in NJ. Yuck.
I know they had a tornado touch down in Falls Church a couple years ago. It didn't effect Manassas, but we certainly had some scary nasty storm weather that day! I remember because it turned so dark and ugly that I called Craig at work to tell him it was making me nervous. He told me I was being silly. And then five minutes later he called me back because it had just hit at his work and he was now agreeing with me that it was pretty freaky weather!
Never had to deal with a hurricane this far north, but I've heard it can happen. But I'll admit that that's one thing I don't lose sleep over! (My in-laws in Houston have had to evacuate at least twice because of hurricane warnings. No fun!)
I'll take a tree falling on my house over a tick any day.
There was a tornado in Brooklyn right after Samuel was born - that was pretty dang freaky!
I'm glad you warned me about the picture, because you're right - that thing does look a lot like a spider!! I never would've looked at your blog again if you had actually put a picture of one of those up...
And as far as weather and bugs (aside from the HUGE spiders at Mom and Dad's), Seattle is pretty much perfect.
One last thought: "Thanks to you, this town (WA DC) is over run by baboons!" "Um, isn't that the fault of the voters??" :0)
Ok I am so not making this up. I was reading your tick post (ew!) and not 30 seconds later a bug fell out of my hair at work (!!). (I'm not totally dirty person -- I'd just been walking outside under some low hanging branches near my building, so I'm assuming it fell on me a half hour ago.)
So I screamed and the other postdocs in my room were very confused about what could possibly have gone so wrong with excel as to have caused an outburst like that. :)
Ok I hope there aren't any others!!!
I'm blaming the bad dream I had last night on you! In my dream, Cameron had somehow come down with Lyme Disease! I don't really remember the details now, but it wasn't good. I was awfully glad that it was just a dream!!
I LOVE the vision of Bentley excited for a new sleeping bag. And Kendra with pretty nails. (And eating so much macaroni and cheese--who knew?!)
I second Rachael, the occasional tree falling wins over ticks or anything else mentioned, ANY day.
Also, I would have NEVER thought to check Bentley for ticks.
Post a Comment