I grew up in New England. House Flies, Mosquitoes, Black flies....that's your bugs folks. Granted, black flies are nasty, but nothing like what we have where we are now. Any day now we are going to be struck with cicadas of plague proportions. They will come out of the ground after 17 years, shed their nasty skin, make baby cicadas and die, leaving me plenty of patio sweeping to do. They are huge and clumsy and fly into anything and they make an incredibly loud noise, and when thousands upon thousands make a really loud noise, it's out of control. They don't bite or sting, but they are huge and gross. So there is those.
A couple of weeks ago we did something I never thought we would do, we had the Pest Control guy come and spray our house. It started when I was running down our basement stairs one day and it was dark and I had no shoes on and almost stepped on this guy:
I did what any self respecting woman would do when seeing thing thing (which was the size of the palm of my hand) very close to her foot, I screamed, ran back up the stairs from the family room, shut the door and googled: "A spider and a locust made a baby....what is it??" Remarkably I got an answer. This is a camel, spider, or mole cricket, all 3 names acceptable. Why God made them I have yet to discover. But He did. And they come down into the unfinished portion of our basement and try to creep into the family room down there. The darn thing was big enough that Matt finally got it a couple of weeks later (during which time I went nowhere near the lower level of our town house) and had to kill it with a big wrench from his tool bucket....yes folks, a wrench.
But I had decided I would suck it up and live with the bugs and we wouldn't call the bug treatment guy to come and I would tough it out and blah blah blah. Until one evening when Matt and I were both sitting on the couch half asleep talking about how we really should be in bed already and we really needed to get up etc. As we were finally preparing to get off our butts this scuttled across the living room floor:
Like a champ I yelled and tucked my feet up thinking that I most certainly never, ever, ever was leaving the couch again. Matt jumped up and grabbed the nearest thing he could get his hands on (a tissue box) and managed to beat the thing to death after it scuttled across Maggie's jungle mat. We stood over it both hoping we could convince ourselves it was something other than what it was....but it indeed was a cockroach. And at that point I was done. We were paying for treatment, paying for the ugly chemicals, paying to keep these out.
Luckily when the exterminator came he said because we live near woods and everything we were seeing were wet woods bugs he thought they were coming inside to get out of the cold at night. So we had him treat. He seemed hesitant to treat our windows, and then informed us that the cockroaches were likely flying at our windows to get inside. After which Matt insisted he treat the windows knowing if I returned home and found out they hadn't been I'd be calling them back.
I grew up thinking I wasn't really a baby when it came to bugs, I realize now that is because we didn't really have bugs where I grew up. Here's to hoping that Maggie gets her father's non-squeamishness when it comes to critters.
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