Notes from the Front

(Yes, I stole the image straight from Amazon!)

So, there is this great book that I loved as a child and my children love as well (we've loved our way through 3 different copies, so far) called Henry's Awful Mistake by Robert Quakenbush. It tells the story about how Henry the duck found an ant in his kitchen while he was cooking dinner for his friend Clara and in the process of trying to kill the ant, he destroys his entire house. (And he never actually kills the ant!) It's starting to feel like that around here.

So we ripped out Miranda's carpet and baseboard, threw out nearly half the contents of her closet, enclosed her mattress and pillow in plastic, and are washing her bedding every morning, only to discover, thanks to my mother, that the most effective way to kill the bedbugs is to wait until Miranda goes to sleep, then lurk over her with a flashlight and a kleenex and smash them one by one when they come out to eat.

Yes, we are still going to poison her bed frame with the chemicals that arrived this afternoon, which should further cut down on the population, but this is what my stalwart mother and husband do in the evening before they go to sleep. I, myself can't seem to face the bugs in the dark. In the light of day I have no problem smashing them, but after the sun goes down, I twitch and shudder and run the other direction. The give me the creeping horrors. Ugh.