A History of My Interactions with Bugs

Like any normal person, I am not overly fond of bugs.  Growing up in the woods in Washington state, we never had much of a bug problem in our house, unless you count spiders (which, for the purposes of our discussion, totally count as "bugs").  We had high ceilings and rafters, so those were favorite places for spiders to lurk.  No amount of dusting ever guaranteed that you wouldn't find one more cobweb somewhere else.  And any time you left your clothing in a heap on the floor, you wanted to check them carefully when you finally got around to picking them up.  Especially in the winter time, it was not unlikely that a quick shake would yield some frantic scuttling away of a local arachnid.  Ewwww....  (Note that this never deterred us from leaving our clothes on the floor!)

But honestly, that was about it.  I don't remember EVER finding an ant in my house.  Pause for a moment and consider just how awesome that is.

When I lived in Africa, I had to put up with a lot of bugs.  Mosquitoes, as you would expect, in Tanzania.  And a lot of ants.  Of varying sizes.  There was also the time when we figured out that the strange rattling we would sometimes hear at night was caused by scorpions sleeping under our tent, probably trying to use our body heat to keep warm.  Delightful.  And there were termite mounds everywhere.

I hated the bugs in Africa, but I was also able to sort of detach from it all a little bit.  Bugs were part of Africa, and loving Africa meant putting up with bugs.

But as soon as I was back in the U.S., bugs were not to be tolerated any more.  This is AMERICA, for crying out loud!  First world countries destroy bugs!!!  Finding an ant in Utah used to enrage me.

And then I moved to Virginia.

Our move here was a full on, life changing experience.  I went from being a busy graduate student where I knew lots of people and had lots of friends, to being a stay-at-home mom to a newborn where I knew no one.  And Craig had a full time job and was gone all day, and was so stressed out by his first year of teaching that he would usually come home and just stare, zombie-like, in front of him.  It was not a fun or easy year for either of us.  And add to that my first experience with the occasional house centipede or silverfish, and I was sort of a wreck over the bugs.  (Reading this paragraph over again, I'm shocked that I didn't have postpartum depression.  This sounds like a recipe for it.)  (Also, I thought about inserting a few pictures in here, but then I remembered that I like you, so I won't.)

I once spoke with my Relief Society president, Betsy, about the bugs.  She was the one who identified what a house centipede even was, since I didn't know and didn't have internet to try and look them up.  Her description of them-- she called their legs "feathery"-- made them sound not as horrifying as they are.  Betsy has been a middle school science teacher her whole career, so she isn't squeamish.  In fact, when she had a hysterectomy, she asked the doctor if she could keep her uterus.  About as not squeamish as you can get.  (The doctor refused, but did take a picture of it for her, which delighted Betsy!  That doctor was my favorite ob-gyn ever...)

Anyway, about the bugs, Betsy simply said, "Well, you just have to become a predator in your home."  Something about that resonated with me.  This was MY home and I was going to PROTECT it.  I WOULD keep it safe from the evil, vile silverfish.  House centipedes, beware!  Alanna is on the hunt!!!

That got me through the first few years, including once when a silverfish was hanging around on the ceiling above Bentley's crib and I couldn't decide which was worse: leaving a creepy disgusting bug near my baby, or spraying pesticides right over his crib.  (I honestly don't remember what I finally decided...)

When we bought our first house, we went through a few different bug problems.  First it was box elder bugs.  Then we had the occasional cave crickets, until we replaced the carpet (???).  And then there was one truly horrific summer where we had a cockroach infestation in our kitchen.  We tried numerous things ourselves to get rid of them, but when we began finding them upstairs, I finally convinced Craig to hire an exterminator, who got rid of them very fast.  That was probably the best investment ever in my sanity.  I still shudder when I remember being afraid to ever go to the kitchen in the middle of the night, and declining to ever bring food to anyone (because who would want food from my kitchen?).  I would even wash every dish before using it to make dinner, and then again after we were done eating.  I was so paranoid of the cockroaches.  Ugh, it was awful.


So where I'm going with all this, is that our current bug problem is that we keep getting-- wait for it-- ladybugs!  Not tons of them-- maybe a couple a day?  Mostly in Ryder's room and my bathroom.


And I'm having a really hard time worrying about them too much. 

I know how much worse it could be.