Boxelder Bug: Friend or Foe?

This is a particularly bad year for the boxelder bug infestation on our property and in our home. According to my limited research, those little guys hide out in walls and attics for the winter and come out into the open to visit on warm, sunny days. Milder weather means more bugs so obviously some years are worse than others. The last really bad year was the fall the twins were three. One of the boys hated those bugs so much that he would yell at them and jump up and down or stomp whenever one approached. He was so distressed that I eventually left the vacuum cleaner in the middle of the living room with the attachment hose connected and showed him how to turn it on and off. Several times over the course of any given day that winter I would hear the machine turn on followed by the “fwoop, fwoop, fwoop” of little bugs being sucked to their death.

The following two years weren’t so bad and the presence of the little red-winged squatters went relatively unnoticed.

Not this year. This year those guys are all up in everything around this place. Unfortunately for them, the boys are now six and bugs are less like scary mini-beasts and more like teeny-tiny little playmates.

It is sort of unfair for the bugs.

Truly.

Because 100 million winged insects are no match for two kindergarten boys.

Evidently, the torture began this fall, when the bugs first started to arrive in their bedroom window. They decided to try to colonize the boxelders by stuffing every single one that they found into the heat vent in their floor. When I first discovered that this was happening, nearly three months after it all started, they appeared to be very sincere in their belief that their teeny friends were happily setting up house in the vents beneath their floor. Sort of like underground ant tunnels. Right? Unfortunately, when we removed the grate, we did not find the picturesque boxelder bug village that they imagined.

We found a heaping pile of cremated insect.

Then, quite by accident, they discovered that boxelder bugs could swim. This led to a house-wide collection of the little guys so that they could host a “Boxelder Bug Swim Meet”.

In the toilet.

A few days later they offered their friends a high intensity carnival-type ride. By which I mean that they stuffed a balloon from the local hardware store with bugs, blew it up and released it from the balcony in our home – thereby blowing a lovely combination of boxelders and boy spit all over the living room.

Another day, I found several of them suction cupped to the glass sliding door with Nerf “bullets”.

Ummm…gross.

So, by now you are probably thinking, “Boxelder Bugs? Foe, I say! FOE!”

Well, I would have agreed with you until my boys launched their latest mission.

They came out of their bedroom and announced to me that they were going in search of the “Boxelder Bug Nest”.

I have no idea what sort of epic adventure they were envisioning but they were prepared. One boy was wearing his Spy Gear Night Vision Goggles. The other boy was wearing a Kung Fu Panda sweatband with toilet paper tubes tucked in over each ear. They both had on Spiderman fanny packs stocked with fruit snacks and string cheese. The boy with the goggles was wearing a cape and the other had a Nerf gun stuck in under the strap on his fanny pack. One of them was also wearing a belt over his sweatshirt but that appeared to be less about function and more about style.

I didn’t ask any questions other than “whuzzup little explorer dudes”?

They outlined their plans in a whisper, peeked around the basement door and tiptoed down the stairs.

Full disclosure: I ever so carefully closed the basement door behind them and did not check on them once the whole time they were down there. They were very quiet. For an hour.

An entire hour.

Do you have any idea what a stay-at-home-mom can accomplish in one uninterrupted hour?

I didn’t know either because in ten years of parenting, IT’S NEVER HAPPENED!

Here’s what one could feasibly do in an hour:

Empty the dishwasher in record time. Spend five minutes vacillating between throwing out all of the Tupperware, reorganizing the cupboard to make it all fit or just slamming the door with the hope that everything falls out on someone that isn’t you. Settle on option three.

Clean the kid’s bathroom. Including the section behind the toilet where the hand towel always seems to mysteriously land in a puddle of pee.

Put away the grownup's laundry. Because, given time, the kid's laundry always gets put away first. Grownups can get a pair of socks out of the bottom of the laundry basket without dumping out every other neatly folded piece of clothing in the place. Kids can’t.

Speaking of socks, a mom might decide to go ahead and clean out her sock drawer while she’s putting away laundry. Good thing - because who knew that she would find a pair of panty hose from her wedding nearly fourteen years ago? What we can’t seem to figure out is why she decided to try them on and make the startling discovery that “muffin top” is a wholly inadequate description of the phenomenon that occurs when one tries to squeeze a mom body into a pair of tights from her youth.

Fortunately, there was still time left in the hour for the mom to viciously stuff the hose into the trash and soothe her scarred soul with a handful of chocolate.

In short, it was probably the most productive hour I have experienced in years.

Thanks to the boxelder bugs.

So, Mr. Boxelder, let me shake your teensy weensy hand and call you “friend”.

Welcome.

Mi casa, su casa…