Turds Hanging from a Chandelier

Dear Daughter: "I wish I was a hippie!"

Me: "I wish I was one, too. Only I don't have cool straight hippie hair, so I'd have to wear dreadlocks."

Dear Daughter: "Dreadlocks! No way! That looks like turds hanging from a chandelier!"

She does have a point.

He's Playing My Heart Strings Again

Dear Son: Grabs my hand and whispers to me, "Mommy, when I grow up I'm going to live right next to you!"

Me: With heart full of warm fuzzies,"That would be wonderful, Sweet Boy! I will remind you of that when you turn 30!"

Real Life Word Problems

Dear Daughter: "I'm getting excited about my birthday! It's only two weeks and ten days away!"

Me: "Well, you know ten days equals a week and three days, right?"

Dear Daughter: ...pause..."Okay, so it's three weeks and three days away then...."

(...sinking in...) "I think I liked it better the other way."

Conspiracy Theory

There are bugs in this state that is considered "Midwest." Lots and lots of bugs. Large bugs. Large bugs that are noisy. Smallish bugs that are poisonous. Very large bugs that are completely benign (and even quiet). Most of our bugs, however, are really qualified to be bugs of a southern state caliber. And let me qualify something here--while this is considered a "Midwest" state, we live in the far southwest corner of this "Midwest" state, and this far southwest corner is a mere 30 minutes north of a "Southwest" state, and a mere 90-ish minutes west of a "Southwest" state. I don't think the bugs here understand that they are not occupying a southern state, or most certainly they would pack up and move a bit more south, or west of us. It must be Global Warming that is confusing them. I realize I post each year at about this time about the bugs where I live. But the bugs here this time of year really are headline worthy.

I won't make this another post about the thousands of massive buzzing green June Beetles that hatch and overrun our neck of the woods each summer for about three weeks. And yes, we are infested with those as I speak.

What I really want to comment on has to do the poisonous spiders that live in the area and which are apparently especially prolific this year, and which we recently discovered have set up house--in OUR house. These spiders are known as Brown Recluse, and in all the years I've lived here, I've never felt the need to know anything more except that such a "boogey-spider" existed in this area. I assumed them to be some big hairy largish critter with large googly eyes, and about the size of a tarantula, and living only in the backwoods of the remotest hunting and camping spots of the region. Or something like that. This was all I needed to know or believe about such spiders. Afterall, while I've been known to hang out in, and thoroughly ENJOY, the backwoods and remote hunting and camping spots in wilder places of the United States (such as the northmost points in Idaho), I didn't live among bugs there. Oh sure, there were Grizzly Bears and the like. But there weren't bugs. And if there were bugs, they must have been quite small, as I never saw them.

When our pastor was recently bit by a Brown Recluse spider, requiring a visit to the Emergency Room, I became morbidly curious. Google is equally handy and horrifying when a person is morbidly curious. I apparently now know more about the Brown Recluse spider than the professional exterminators who have come to our home recently, and who exterminate Brown Recluse for a living. After reciting a couple Brown Recluse facts, he informed me that he had learned something from me that day. That's when I decided I didn't need to talk to Google anymore about Brown Recluse spiders. Too much knowledge isn't always a good thing.

First of all, for those of you who are NOT familiar with these curiously NOT big hairy or googly-eyed spiders, here is a picture of what they look like (don't worry, I'll keep it a small picture):

See? It's not at all hairy. They don't even have barbs on their legs. And while they have six eyes (rather than the eight that spiders typically have) their eyes are not at all googly. And they are not even big. At full growth, their leg span is not typically much wider than a quarter, but they may only reach about dime width. That's a small specimen who can create quite a big injury. I'm not going to talk about the bites here. Suffice it to say that they are quite painful and can cause a big mess. In some cases even death, though more common a necrotic wound that will heal successfully if treated quickly. Nearly everyone I know around here either has been bit themselves, or know someone who has been bit.

After our pastor was recently bit and I launched my research, feeling relatively sure that I had never seen a spider like this, I happened by the sink in our basement kitchenette, where a spider caught my eye. I did a double take, as it looked exactly like the one in this picture. I stooped over as close as I dared, to examine the back of the critter to see if I could see the token "violin" shape. Indeed, there it was. I screamed for Dear Husband, who didn't spend near as much time or get nearly as close as I had to it in order to confirm the identification of it. He swooped in with a folded paper towel and squashed it, shrugging his shoulders and saying, "So?"

So? SO? SO???!!!!!!

Rest assured that I had already ordered some Catchmaster glue traps over the Internet, deciding that I was determined to see what we would catch. The traps arrived the day after Husband squashed the spider in the sink, saying, "So?" I ordered him to place them around the house. Lots of them. I had ordered 60 traps. Within a couple days, we started catching them. We went from not knowing what they looked like and never suspecting them in our home, to catching them by the dozens. I quickly made an appointment with the exterminator, and by the time he arrived, we had caught over 50.

At this point, we had spent two long days tearing apart our large basement storage area and garage. We store out of season clothing and linens in our storage room. And things were stored in cardboard boxes. Isn't that what storage rooms are for? Clothing and linens and boxes? I learned that is what Brown Recluse like to hide in. We tore it all apart, re-storing clothing in vacuum packed space bags and plastic bags with zip ties. We got rid of all the cardboard boxes. We went through everything. We only found about 2-3 Brown Recluse in the process. But in all, in the past three weeks, we have caught or killed about 75 of these critters. I've learned that they are known to be common HOUSE SPIDERS in this area, living in MOST-if not ALL-houses in this area. Who knew? Hairy backwoods spiders, indeeed.

If there can be any comfort in all of this, the vast majority of what we have caught are dime sized or even smaller. There have only been three or so quarter or larger sized. There have been many tiny ones the size of ants. I would guess we've had more than one relatively recent hatching, as we have juveniles at different stages. However, the exterminator told me that even the juveniles are capable of biting and causing damage to human bite victims.

And it provides a bit of comfort to know these spiders are called "Recluse" because they are, by nature, reclusive. They are shy, nocturnal predators that prefer to hide during the day and live in quiet undisturbed corners and crevices. They are not at all aggressive, and are incapable of biting unless their bodies are compressed, as would happen if sat upon, rolled over on in bed, or smashed against your skin when putting on clothing. So this is why bites often happen when you are sleeping at night. Yeah, suddenly my comfort level wanes a bit. In order to be bitten while sleeping at night, that means that the critter has to be IN your bed.

Most of what we've caught have been in the basement--but we have the kind of basement we LIVE in. Our family room, kitchenette, kids' playroom, office--all are in the basement. We have caught them in all of our bedrooms upstairs. We have 60 traps planted strategically around the entire 3,600 square footage of our home. I check them every morning and every night. I am the vacuum queen--vacuuming diligently in every corner and crevice regularly. I'm confident we are now having a dramatic decline, though I won't be satisfied until they are GONE from my home-something I've been cautioned is practically impossible in this area.

And common, indeed. So far, most people in this area I've commented to about our Brown Recluse battle respond that they have seen and killed them in their homes as well or are battling an infestation of their own.

I was even greeted by a largish Brown Recluse in the sink in the ladies' restroom at my office last week. I thought I was losing my mind. I'm pretty sure I muttered, "You gotta be kidding! These things must be following me!" before I wearily sought out one of the guys around the office to take care of it. Guys like to do those sorts of things--it feeds their egos.

Thankfully, no one in our household has been bitten. I'm vigilant to check bed sheets each night and rub the kids down with peppermint oil (speculated to be a deterrent). The exterminator will be back in two more weeks, and I will call him back every two weeks for as long as it takes.

I'll mention only briefly here that during the week that we caught the first 50 Brown Recluse in our home, I also killed a huge Black Widow in the garage. There are two poisonous spiders that live in this region--and both types apparently like our home.

I've thought a bit recently about moving back to the wilderness area of northern Idaho where I never saw bugs, and where I could leave Brown Recluse, massive golf-ball sized buzzing June Beetles, and other assorted very large and very noisy insects behind, and live peacefully in the mountain forests with the Grizzly Bears.

Rationalizing...

While working on a little craft project with the kids today, I said we had to take it easy on the amount of tape we used as we were running low.

Daughter busily worked away, and I became distracted with something else until she spoke up as she taped a piece of paper down on her project, "I'm going to have to rationalize this since we are running out of tape!"

I'm pretty sure she meant that she needed to "ration" the tape, though from the looks of what she was creating, rationalizing could help a bit as well....

Turning Corners?

My Dear Daughter, in all her almost-eight-years-old-ness, has developed a penchant for passive-aggressiveness, especially toward her little brother. If you're a mom, you know the kind I mean.... I'm talking about how she has this uncanny way of saying something to her brother under her breath or behind our backs or in just such a way that she knows will really get her brother's goat. The kind that allows her to follow up with overdone "innocent eyes" and an overdone, "What??!!!" followed by something like, "...all I said was that the show Zach wanted to watch on tv is a 'baby show'." And this really translates into, "You're a total stupid-head if you like to watch that show, so you'd better agree to watch what I want to watch." Dear Son knows that even if his big sister's words appear relatively innocuous, he senses that he's somehow been made fun, belittled, or manipulated. He doesn't have the verbal savvy his big sister has to express exactly WHY he gets so fed up in response to her, so he simply handles it by slugging her. Hard. Eight times in the face.

And some of the time, I confess, I feel like I really can't blame him. HOWEVER--we have been working on the hitting thing since the boy-child was about two years old. No consequence for this behavior ever mattered enough to short-circuit the brain pathway he had built around the idea that when his sister is subtly passive-aggressive or manipulative, the only way to feel better is to smack her. It's been a hard habit to break.

I've come down hard on them both this summer, deciding that it didn't matter if it cost them their entire summer if it had to; the subtle antagonizing and the not-so-subtle beat-the-crap-out-of-my-infuriating-sister behaviors had to stop.

I had long discussions with my girl-child about how she repeatedly sets her brother up to hit her. I had long discussions with my boy-child about how I know his sister knows which buttons to push, but that no matter how antagonizing she is being, it's not okay to haul off and deck her.

The kids lost a trip to play in the water fountains downtown and a trip to the water park another week, and still the rotten behaviors continued. Then one day I promised my little gamer boy-child that he could play Sonic on the Xbox after lunch that day, until I found out he had punched his sister in the face for annoying him earlier that morning. I looked at him sadly and calmly informed him that he was not going to get to play Sonic after lunch after all because he hit his sister, and that has GOT to stop. Whereas he was seemingly unfazed by the other lost privileges this summer so far, apparently this one hit home hard. He left the room silently, and a moment later I heard absolute wailing and sobbing coming from his bedroom. Even Daughter was caught off guard and ran to his side to see if he got hurt. It is not Son's M.O. to cry and wail when he doesn't get his way. He didn't throw a fit, he just sobbed like his little heart would never mend again. I stood my ground, sad as I was myself about the whole ordeal, stressing to the boy-child that he simply had to learn to stop hitting. Meanwhile his sister was impacted by how sad her little brother was and realized how she had again set him up. He asked her to stop doing something that was annoying, and she didn't. So he punched her in the face. I sternly reviewed with her how she is the older sister and how she behaves affects how her brother decides to behave, and how she repeatedly sets him up, blah blah blah blah.

Son, while absolutely devastated over losing Sonic for the day, was very well behaved the rest of the day and the next morning, and I rewarded him with an hour of Sonic that morning. Not an hour after he got to play Sonic, he hit his sister again. It was out of habit. He didn't think before acting and when I called him on it, it was like he hadn't even realized until that moment that he had hit his sister and thus blown it again. The consequences weren't pretty. The kids lost all summer privileges again for a few days. It was sobering for them. I emphasized how their summer is passing them by while they choose to treat each other rottenly.

And that was the last time such behavior happened. It's been 11 days with no bickering, passive-aggressiveness, hitting....My kids have become delightful to hang with. We've gone to the regular park and the inflatable park with friends and tomorrow we plan to have fun at the fountains with friends. Even just hanging around the house with them playing Go Fish! and Checkers has become enjoyable. I'm hoping (albeit cautiously) that we've finally turned a corner.... Hold your breath!

Highly Distracted

I don't often find myself fumbling for words, and I've often been told that I actually tend to put them together quite well.

I've had trouble with my words and my focus over the past eleven days or so. We live approximately 60 miles from Joplin, MO. Yes, this is the place that has been all over the news for the past week and a half--where the EF5 tornado hit and demolished this city. I've read the twister described as a "multivortex monster" with winds over 200 mph. While we have no direct family or friends who lost lives in this storm, we do have friends whose families have lost their homes. And even if we didn't directly know any of the 140 lives lost, I have felt very somber and in a true "funk" since the event. Highly distracted. While we scurried to find cover as the tornado warnings entered our area, they soon passed, and we ran outside to see the beautiful, yet eerie, double rainbow that hung in the strangely colored sky. The entire double arch could be seen in our backyard. I didn't yet know the extent of the massive impact on our neighbors in Joplin--of the babies ripped from their mommy's arms in the 200 mph winds, the daddy found with his arms wrapped around his two young children (all of them found deceased and buried under the rubble in a local big chain store), of the teenager sucked out of the sunroof of his car and out of his father's grasp immediately following his high school graduation. I didn't yet know these or the countless other horrifying stories that would begin to surface in the following days. I only knew a twister had touched down in a community nearby, and that the sky looked weird.

I had never heard of a "rain wrapped tornado" in the many years that I've lived in this area. Tornadoes are somewhat common here, and in the past decade we have seen the paths of destruction that tornadoes make. We've seen houses destroyed just a few short miles from our own home. We've known of lives lost to tornadoes. Several times each spring, we scurry to our basement to watch the local weatherman narrate what is going on in the current weather patterns as tornado warnings post to our area. We perch, ready to crawl into a concrete room in the corner of the basement on a moment's notice. It's almost normal to us, in a weird sort of way. But I confess that even as we find ourselves huddled before the basement television, watching the weatherman and the storm-tracker radar, I don't often feel great concern. We get desensitized to it around here. Tornado sirens are common and most often don't amount to much more than several moments of watching the weatherman and then returning to our "regularly scheduled" lives. The night the tornado hit Joplin, we carried out this ritual of scurrying to the basement, yet something felt strangely different. Perhaps it was because we had just heard that a tornado hit Joplin minutes earlier. We had not yet heard how massive the tornado was. It had not yet been classified as an EF5. We had no idea that nearly 7,000 homes had been destroyed and that 140 people had died or would die in its wake. Perhaps this time felt strangely different because as I grabbed my cell phone on the way to the basement, I received a text from my pastor's wife asking if we were okay and telling us that our dear associate pastor's daughter had lost her home in Joplin. Whatever the reason that made this time strangely different, my heart pounded heavy until the warning lifted and we got the "all clear."

It could have been my community just as easily as Joplin. And I realize now that if it had, we would not have had time to take cover, as apparently this "rain wrapped" beast was not detected until it was upon Joplin. They had little to no warning. Five minutes, I've heard, but many didn't know anything about a tornado headed their way until it hit-blowing their home and family to the four corners. We, too, would have been blown apart, as we were outside building a patio, and only came in when the rain started and the sky began to look a little odd. I went about feeding the kids dinner as Dear Husband picked up outside. "Check the weather!" He called to me. I was busy putting something in the oven and decided I'd just let him check it when he came in. If we hadn't been blown apart while still outdoors working, we may have been blown apart while Husband was picking up tools and I was putting dinner in the oven. Or even while perched on the couch watching the weather, assuming we had time to dive for cover in the concrete closet.

Yes, it very well could have been us. My heart breaks over and over again for the loss of our neighbors to the west. The aching arms of moms and dads for their lost children and the aching arms of spouses for their partners. Wondering how it must feel to be sitting down to dinner with your family one moment and the next moment have no home or family left. Wondering how a person picks up and goes on after that. It's overwhelming. Word's can't even begin to make sense of it, and in these moments, I am thankful for my faith in knowing I have a God in Heaven whose grace and mercy abounds even in the midst of stuff we don't understand.

...and I'm thankful He can interpret the groaning I feel inside that I can't quite justify with words.