Problem is, it's true. I shutter at the thought of posting this, but for the sake of documenting, I must.
The guts of Christmas: prepping, wrapping, traveling, enjoying, fellowship, meditating on The greatest gift, uncontainable excitement, wrapping paper messes and impossible packaging nightmares were all superb and wonderful and grand in our own family's special way. But a small shadow of yuck, with a little twinge of gut-sinking was introduced to our precious Christmas Day.
You see, after the excitement of Christmas morning settled in, and each child had more toys than they knew what to do with and my parents and grandparents witnessed my house in the worst disarray they've ever seen, it was time to lay Brandon down for his nap.
I prepped him, quieted him, hugged him and whispered sweet nothings in his ear. Then, when I bent over to lay him in his crib I noticed some blood spots. I had noticed them the week before, but just thought they were from a hang nail on his toe that I had forgotten to trim, and it caught on the sheets, and started bleeding a little and eventually quit. But this was more than just a little hang nail blood. There was more than that and we hadn't noticed it before because when we usually pick him up out of his bed, it's dark.
My heart sank.
Actually, it started beating really fast.
My face went pale and I started to enter into a pre-panic stage.
I walked calmly to Jim, who was in the middle of saying good-bye to my mom and grandparents and said, "You need to come see this now."
My Mom noticed the urgency, gave me a hug, wished me a Merry Christmas and led her mom and dad out the door.
When Jim saw the blood on the bed, his face lost color also and he said, "Do you think it is?"
Our worst nightmare was coming to fruition.
Jim works with Chemical companies. It's his job. He has a pesticide license. He's heard from the sales reps horror stories of people dying of Temik poisoning, caught in a belly button, from a granule the size of a Nerd candy. He's also heard horror stories of bed bug infestations. Like half the hotels in Orlando have/had bed bugs and that they're real boogers to get rid of. Very costly and time-consuming.
So mix in a little chemical sales rep horror stories with an overload of cautious-nature and we get full-blown paranoid-city when we would visit hotels. We'd put all our luggage on the tile floor in the bathrooms, check the mattress seams, behind the headboard and underneath the nightstands. All looking for remnants of those tick-looking creatures that roam the sheets and prey on sleeping targets. Then, when we'd get home, we'd lay all the luggage and it's contents out on the driveway and let it bake in the 100-degree Florida sun for half the day, then run all the clothes, dirty or not, through a hot wash cycle and high hot dry cycle.
Sounds like overkill? I thought so.
Back to Christmas day...
We decided not to lay Brandon back in his bed so we got out the pack 'n play and laid him down in there. In the middle of Christmas day and lunch time, we did our best to process what we had just seen and inspect his crib even further.
The rest of the day was difficult to enjoy, I'll just be honest here. We researched online what bed bugs looked like, because our blood-drained faces were tell-tale signs our greatest fear was lurking, living and feeding in our home.
That night, after the kids were asleep, Jim and I turned into spelunking-like inspectors. We both had on head lamps and every 30 minutes, until well into the wee hours of the morning, we would sneak into Brandon's room, quickly turn on the lamps, turn over pillows, blankets, stuffed animals and collect the blasted little creatures that were scattering away from the light. Our collection was nearing a dozen inside a ziploc bag so our next order of business was to research pest control companies to call first thing the next morning.
We selected 2 we felt comfortable with and December 26th, at 7am in the morning, we called both companies and scheduled for them to come out to inspect.
Both pesticide experts confirmed the little creatures in the ziploc bags were bed bugs and they both gave us estimates on destroying the pests. One estimate cost less but was labor-intensive. It was going to mean living out of plastic bags for 6 weeks. The other estimate cost more, and was labor-intensive also, but it was going to be 99% over the next day.
We opted for the more expensive one. Not what anybody wants to be spending Christmas $ on the day after Christmas.
One other thing that was terribly heartbreaking at the time was the surgery I had planned. I had nose surgery scheduled for December 27th. A surgery I had been needing/wanting for 25 years and here we were having to choose an indefinite cancellation of surgery because of bed bugs. I willingly submitted to whatever decision my husband thought was best for our family. But was still a little sad. Mad mostly, at those stupid bugs.
The next plan of attack was prepping for the pesticide treatment. The more expensive yet quicker option involved heating our entire house up to 140 degrees for a duration of 4 hours. Which meant mattresses were turned upright, candles and aerosols were removed from the house, ALL the clothes in drawers were taken out and run through a high heat cycle in the dryer for 30 minutes and everything in the closets had to be cleared enough for the heat to penetrate through everything. Quilts were taken down, clothes had to be hanging freely, not bunched together, books on shelves had to be opened up, you name it, we had to clean it/prep it for the heat. Basically, EVERYTHING in the house had to be heat penetrable because the heat was what was going to kill the bugs.
We ended up taking 3 truck loads of old clothes/trash to the dump, the dryer ran continuously for a day and a half, and I still had 30 loads to dry down at the laundromat. After all the clothes were dried, they then had to be bagged, sealed and placed outside to avoid re-infestation. Our back porch patio table was piled high with clothes in trash bags, sealed off with blue painters tape and my attempt to labels what was in each one. I lost count after 30 bags. Oh yeah, and Jim started coming down with flu-like symptoms in the middle of all this.
My mom graciously took the older 2 with her the afternoon of the 26th while we cleaned and we decided to camp out in Pedro Friday night. Friday was the day our house was being heated/treated and it just happened to be in the 30s that morning, which makes it more difficult to heat an ENTIRE HOUSE up to 140 degrees. They arrived at 8 in the morning and we were soon gone, temporarily displaced from our home because of disgusting, tick-like bugs. It took them all day to complete the heating process, because they had to heat the house in shifts. It required more/larger heaters that they didn't have. I think they finally left our house around 7pm. Thank goodness we decided to camp out in Pedro.
Saturday morning, I left Pedro early to start getting our house back in order. The beds needed to be made, clothes put back in the drawers, just general putting together stuff before the precious little hurricanes entered. But I got about 15 minutes into unpacking and felt sick. I came down with flu-like symptoms and basically called that morning/day a wash because my back was flat on the bed most of the day.
Oh when it rains, it pours.
We eventually got through it ALL. We completed a great Spring cleaning a couple of months early and since then we've been bed bug free.
It's not a story we're proud of, besides the fact that Jim and I pulled off an incredible feat in a short amount of time. But certainly worth documenting.
Nasty little joker
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