Buggy Times

This past Friday, the kids and I took a hike at a nearby state park.  We had just got a new bug catcher and wanted to put it to some good use.  I thought we would be more successful if we went  somewhere a little more wooded than our back yard.  So, off we went to Route 66 State Park.

The kids loved walking along the trail to look for bugs.  Abby is pretty good at using that magnifying glass!

Emily wasn't quite as interested.  She slept the entire time.

The bug catcher came with a special tool for catching bugs so you don't have to use your fingers.  You capture things in this scissor like tool, then put it in your box.  Here is Ethan hard at work.

In the end, we got a butterfly, a spider and a lady bug...........

.........oh yeah and TICKS!

So, me not being quite the outdoors woman, didn't think about checking everyone for ticks when we got home.  Apparently, we were covered in them and we didn't figure this out until SUNDAY night.  I had little bites all over my legs and I couldn't figure out why.  Finally something caught my eye on my leg and I pulled it off.  It was TEENY TINY.  I'm surprised I even saw it.  I put it on my fingernail and it crawled.  GROSS.  So, then I started looking more and I found another.....and another.....and another....

In just one look by myself, I pulled off at least 10.  I called Brian in then and said, "what the heck are theses??"  We weren't positive so of course we were off to google.  We weren't sure if we had bed bugs or what!  Brian did another sweep of my body and pulled off at least 5 more bugs.  So, that's 15 on just me.  The next morning I checked the kids and each of them had some on them.  Emily had just one on her head, but the other two had probably 5 each.

After talking to a pest control company, Papa Beyrouty and Google, we think we may have encountered a nest of baby ticks.  Apparently there can be hundreds of them and by going through them we picked up about 30 between the 3 of us.  GROSS!!!!!!

So Monday after I freaked out a little, Brian was so kind to actually come home from work.  Grandma even came by to help watch the kids while Brian and I went to work.  We stripped all the beds, vacuumed everything really well and put all kinds of stuff in our dryer to hopefully kill off any ticks that may be hanging around.  So far this morning, we haven't found anymore, so we think we are in the clear.

Gross, gross, gross.