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…

Finnegan

My daughter desperately wants a pet.

We have a cat but he is not enough. She never got to experience him as a kitten and now he is just a grumpy old man who hates kids and sleeps all day.

Her ideal pet would be a puppy but I have enough small bodies to clean up after and a puppy is not in the cards. If we get a pet, it needs to be a practical pet. A pet that gives back.

Like a chicken.

Anyway, she wants a pet so badly that at the beginning of the year she instigated a request for a pet in her fourth grade classroom. After much coercion, the teacher agreed to a fish. She brought in a bright blue Beta. They named it Finnegan.

I’m not sure how the other fourth graders feel about Finnegan but my daughter loves him. She feeds him most days and occasionally stays in at recess to clean out his tank. Because of her deep affection for Finnegan and her commitment to his care, her teacher allowed her to bring this class fish home for the Thanksgiving holiday.

Finnegan survived our house for three days and now the guy is belly up in his Tupperware travel tank.

Ding, dong the fish is dead, people!

Of course the fish is dead. Because that’s the kind of ridiculous crap that always happens here, just west of Wacky. The fish should have known better. The teacher should have known better. I should have known better.

That little blue back-stroker was cursed from the get go.

And now he's Finne-gone.

My daughter is wandering the house in her dirty pajamas quietly crying over the loss of her dear BFF (Blue Fish Finnegan).

I just sighed the “Mom Sigh”.

So, what do I do now?

Do I send the fish to school in a little cotton ball padded box so that her classmates can say good-bye?

Flush, cremate or bury?

Do I buy a new fish?

Do I buy the same color to help them forget or a new color to distinguish between the old fish and the new fish?

And, most importantly…

Can I call the new fish “Finn-again”?

Washed Up and Washed Out

My washing machine took a dump this morning.

It hit the spin cycle with my husband’s hockey gear tucked inside and then stopped. And then started. And then stopped. It sounded like “The Little Engine That Could” except it was more like, “Chug, chug, chug…Hell, no! Chug, chug, chug…No way! Chug, chug, chug…Give it up!”

Plus, I smelled something that reeked a teensy bit of melted rubber and that is never good.

I am not sure that this family of five can survive without a washing machine. Props to the pioneers for handling it old school with lye soap and washboards but the only kind of “mettle” in this 21st century gal is in one of my teeth. Which is obviously not going to get the laundry done.

Honestly, if I were my washing machine, I would have quit way before now. I mean, just last weekend I loaded up that guy with the fiesta of puke and poo left over from a six-year-old boy’s bout with the stomach flu. Not to mention my husband’s hockey and workout gear. No amount of spinning and rinsing can get the stink off that stuff.

To the machine’s credit, it lasted three years longer than its partner, the dryer. Both were replaced 12 years ago and the dryer pooped out first. We found out that the repair would cost nearly as much as a new dryer, and factoring in advancements in energy saving made a new one the more cost effective choice. Plus, the nice men at the store agreed to deliver it right to my house and carry the old one out and they didn’t even laugh at me when they got the old one in the truck and discovered it was still full of our undies.

Props to those guys, too.

But really, my friend the washing machine…did you have to die just before the holidays? In the season when the kids are wearing layers of clothes? Now that my husband is playing hockey twice a week and hunting? This is just cruel timing. It’s inconvenient. And, frankly, I would rather go without my right pinkie finger than my bestie, The Washer.

I’m serious. I haven’t used that thing since I gave up piano 20-something years ago and I almost never drink tea.

So, pinkies?

Whatev…

What I need is a washing machine.

I called my husband with the sad news and he told me to call a professional. That’s when I really lost it. I started to wail about scheduling those awful appointments where they tell you that they will be there sometime between 7:18am and 6:27pm. Then you have to wait while they order the backordered part and then they have to get you back on the appointment schedule (because they are only in your neck of the woods every other Tuesday in months that have an “r”) and then the part is the wrong one so the whole cycle starts all over again and it is NOT the washing machine cycle which is the only cycle that I am really interested in…

And when I paused to take a breath my husband said, “You can at least call and find out when they can look it over. And if that doesn’t work, maybe your dad can take a look at it”.

Is he the voice of reason in this relationship, or what?

My dad. That guy is all kinds of great things. Like handy, retired, local, and he doesn’t mind being paid with leftover Halloween candy. Plus, I am pretty sure that he remembers lye soap and washboards and I know that he wouldn’t want me to suffer those indignities.

Anyway, I called the 1-800 number and turns out they can put me on the schedule for tomorrow. Sometime between the hours of 1pm and 5pm. The visit will only cost me $69.95 plus parts and labor.

$69.95 plus parts and labor.

Sorta makes pinkies and Halloween candy look viable…

Lost, But Not Forgotten

There is a black hole of toys somewhere in my house.

If it’s not a black hole than its Casper the Toy Hiding Ghost. Or maybe there is an alternate plane of reality in the basement of which I am unaware. Or one of those secret cupboards hidden in the back of the closet. I’m leaning toward the paranormal because I’ve seen the blueprints for our house but I suppose one can never be certain…

In any case, there is some sort of top secret “Area 52” in my home where all good toys go to die. I know that I am not the only one who has one. In fact, at a recent wedding shower with friends, another gal mentioned cleaning out a game cupboard and finding three INCOMPLETE Scrabble games. Honestly, People. Does the “Z” chip really just get up and traipse across the “Double Word Score” to freedom?

I don’t think so.

Before children, these things rarely (if ever) came up missing. Now, a pair of matching Barbie shoes is a miracle worthy of papal attention.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve been doing some fall cleaning now that the kids are back in school. I have already made two trips to the local Goodwill and now I am left with the stuff that I can’t figure out how to dump.

It causes me too much guilt.

I just can’t leave games with missing pieces at the VOA Store. It seems like a mean trick to dupe a fellow bargain seeker into buying a Disney Princess game that simply cannot be played properly without the totally unique eight-sided glass slipper die.

You have GOT to have the glass slipper die. Things wouldn’t be right without it.

I can’t throw these things away, either. I actually have nightmares about all of those bright little plastic bits languishing in a dump for all eternity. It’s like Wall-E in my head but without the cute soundtrack and happy ending.

I could just buy another game and merge the two but then I would still have an incomplete set and you can see what sort of an Idiot Circle that could quickly turn into.

I could also probably order just the pieces that I need on-line. And then pay $5 in shipping for a .25 part.

Sorry, but I am just too cheap for that kind of crazy behavior.

So, I did the only thing that I could reasonably do. I set out in search of the…

TOY BLACK HOLE (insert ominous piano chord series here).

This was a quest worthy of Frodo Baggins and his crew of weirdoes (except for the elf - who I still have a teeny crush on). And, boy, did I need me a magic wizard in the lead.

I don’t know if our house will ever be the same.

In case you are thinking of repeating the same mindless search in your house, here a few of the places I checked: pulled out all major appliances, looked inside the heat vents, poked through the contents of the vacuum, raked the sandbox, lifted all of the mattresses, and completed 47 puzzles in search of one missing piece.

To no avail.

I did find an unsuspected cache, albeit an obvious one. While vacuuming under the couch, I bumped my hand against the fabric base of the furniture and heard a little jingle. I reached in from the top and found all the pieces and parts I was missing the LAST time that I went on this rampage - I mean, cleaning binge – as well as a set of Pampered Chef bamboo tongs that I am pretty sure have been missing since New Year’s 2007. Upon hearing this good news, my husband (in a fit of genius) took his pocket knife to the fabric covering the bottom of the couch so that future bits and parts lost in this manner would fall directly to the floor. Not normal. Just necessary. In fact, one would think that furniture manufacturers would have discovered this faulty engineering decades ago.

Seriously, Peeps. It takes a mom.

So, absent any other options, I’ll just throw this out to all my readers…

Anyone need four red “Battleship” pins and a 150 piece dog puzzle that’s missing one corner?

Yeah. I didn’t think so…

Lice Are Not Nice

The boys have been Kindergarteners for exactly three weeks now. Every day at noon I pick them up from school. Every day at noon I ask them to tell me about their day. When I ask them about their day, I sincerely want to know every detail. They tell me nothing. NOTHING. I ask very specific questions that they answer in a very vague manner. They got that from their father (who, nevertheless, is a Cutie Pants whom I adore unconditionally) .

Yesterday, however, was different.

They came running out of the front doors of the elementary waving these bright little booklets and yelling, “Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom, Mom! You are not going to believe this but our school has LICE!”

Yes, indeed. The school has lice. Well, except for the Computer Lab and the Gym/Cafeteria. And, if you are wondering (as I did), how these two areas managed to remain louse-free you should know that it’s because they have no carpet. According to the boys, carpet is the thing that moves lice from one Kindergarten scalp to another. Evidently, Commercial Use Berber is a veritable Mackinac Bridge for head lice. And there ain’t no toll to cross.

So, on this particular day, rather than my asking questions for the entirety of our six minute commute, they filled my head (which was actually starting to itch due to the ultimate power of suggestion) with random information about lice.

The short version as told by two barely six-year-old boys? Lice are like fleas except they can’t jump. They can only crawl across the carpet from one child to another and then climb onto your head. They are nearly as fast as The Flash because they can move up to 12 inches per minute. They are also almost as strong as Superman because they can hold onto a hair so tightly that you won’t be able to get them off.

Basically, Head Lice are like the superheroes of the bug world. Except they don’t save other bugs from certain doom and they’re really more like bad guys to people.

Those two adorable little boys sat in the backseat flipping through their booklets and filling me in on the ups and downs of lice. They were excited! They had learned something new! Lice are, like, totally cool bugs, man – I mean, Mom!

At some point, it crossed my mind that they actually wanted lice. No lie. They were flipping through that lice flier with the same look that they get when perusing their big sister’s American Girl Doll catalog. They pretend they are only looking at the stuffed dog or cat or horse, but you can tell they secretly want an AGD to hug and love and call their own. And that’s OK. But lice? Not cool.

Well, as soon as we got home - before I let them in the house - I snagged one of the lice booklets. Now, I don’t know how Nix, maker of all things that destroy head lice, could have made those sticky little buggers any MORE appealing. Seriously, people, I almost wanted lice. Their marketing guy is a genius. No wonder my boys were hooked.

Right on the cover of this 12-page pamphlet were two adorable, smiling little girls. And the exclamation points! There were at least 17 on the cover alone!

“Heads Up!”

“Get Out of My Hair!”

“Valuable Coupons Inside!”

And my personal favorite, “The Facts Of Lice!”

Now, like me, all of you will spend the rest of your day trying to get this out of your head: “You take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have…The Facts of Lice…The Facts of Lice…”

In fact, this little gem of an advertisement (available in English and Spanish) is so slick I can imagine kindergarteners everywhere trading hats just to experience the joy of plastic shower caps and fine-tooth combs.

You’ll be relieved to know that after a thorough perusal of both scalps, the boys appeared to be nit free. I think that they were a bit dismayed to discover that they weren’t carriers of such a cool bug but I assured them that it was not because there’s anything wrong with them. There just isn’t anything for the little guys to cling to when Mom buzzes your head with a “number one” guard on the clippers.

You heard me, Nix…Number. One. Guard. Your measly little lice are no match for my buzz cuts. I’ve seen your type before and I’m on to you.

Exclamation points and all…

144 Pounds of Yuck

This is the first morning of the school year that I have put all three kids on the bus without having to be somewhere else five minutes later.

So, I decided to do a walk-through of the house and figure out how I wanted to tackle my fall cleaning. For obvious reasons, this is much easier to do when the kids are not following me around leaving a trail of destruction in my wake of cleanliness.

When I flipped on the light in the children's bathroom to survey the damage there, I immediately decided that this would be my starting point. Frankly, following the “Summer of the Five-Year-Old Boys”, it was a bit worse for the wear.

By “a bit worse for the wear” I actually mean, “O.M.G! How could three adorable children with a combined total weight of 144 pounds create this kind of filth in less than ten weeks?!”

I peeked in the tub and the voice in my head cackled, “Mr. T called and he wants his rings back!”

I looked behind the toilet and the voice in my head shouted, “Holy toxic waste, Batman! What sort of Super Criminal could have left behind this mass of destruction?”

I checked out the sink and the voice in my head whispered, “Run, Forrest…Run…”

I actually backed out of that place. I am pretty sure I saw something moving in there and it was definitely not those cute little scrubbing bubble guys.

Now, I am a clean person. My family and friends would probably tell you that my house is usually fairly neat and tidy. This bathroom that I refer to is primarily used by the kids and a random guest. It is wiped down at least once a day but it never stays clean for more than a minute so I don’t know if the dirt is new or old. I wised up about three years ago and redecorated in shades of brown. Taupe walls, brown and taupe striped shower curtain, brown hand towels…all things brown. This morning I actually found a perfect tone-on-tone imprint of a dirty hand on the wall just below the towel rack. My kids will never be able to get away with murder because they leave their fingerprints all over the stinkin’ place. There was more DNA in that tiny 8x8 bathroom than the CSI team finds in an hour (minus commercials).

I re-entered the bathroom armed with several gallons of bathroom-type chemicals, a pair of rubber gloves, an old toothbrush and a shot of vodka. The vodka was for me - not the bathroom - in case some of you were wondering about this new “green” cleaning element…

I came out a half hour later feeling just a little bit woozy – from the chemicals, not the vodka - but incredibly proud. That place had a shine on it that I haven’t seen since I started potty training the boys four years ago. I basked in its beautiful glow and inhaled its lemony fresh scent.

Then, I looked at the clock and realized that there was only one hour and fifty four minutes remaining before the boys would arrive home from school. I would ask them to wash their hands before lunch and at least one of them would have to take care of some immediate potty business.

The voice in my head muttered something about “hard work” and “down the drain” and then started to laugh hysterically.

Oh, well. At least the two of us are approaching this with a sense of humor…

Fool for School

This morning I put all three kids on the bus, together, for the first time.

All. Three. Kids.

I will admit to crying. There was actually a lot more crying than I thought there would be. No misty eyes - full on tears with the tiniest bit of snot. When I realized how momentous and melancholy and other "m" words this occasion was turning out to be for me, I seriously planned to take to my bed. For at least a day or two.

Then, through bright red eyes, I reviewed my "To Do" list for the day. Item number one read, "Replace all four tires on the Acadia". I had an 8:30am appointment at the tire center.

In nine plus years of parenting, I have spent many an hour in the waiting section of various automobile maintenance establishments. Normally, I pack a bag with snacks and mentally prepare myself for multiple bathroom trips and decades old issues of "Highlights" magazine. This morning, I realized that I was going to spend at least an hour kicking back with a cup o' joe and a "People Magazine".

Miraculously, the tears dried up and I suddenly felt an uncontrollable urge to skip...