We spent ten days with my parents in their 200-year-old farmhouse before being able to move into our home. The house is where my dad grew up (originally I wrote ‘and where my grandparents lived’ but it’s obvious my dad lived there with his parents so that was a bit redundant.). I grew up in a house across the fields and creek from this house but when I was in college my parents moved in with my grandmother to help take care of her. I also lived there during college (when I came home on the weekends).
Since the house is very old, it comes with what old houses come with – creaking steps and pipes that squeal at night, sometimes drafty windows and . . . bugs. When I lived there it was spiders that appeared and freaked me out, but during this visit, the creatures leaving my kids and me on edge were ladybugs, ants, and cockroaches that fell from the ceiling (which I never remember having an issue with when I lived there with my parents. Thank God!). The ladybugs swarmed my son’s room on the first night and on one of our last nights there a cockroach fell on his shoulder in the middle of the night.
We discovered the ladybugs swarming in my son’s room, right before we laid down for the night. My son sprayed Raid and then hung out in my room to give time for the ladybugs to disperse. The only problem was that an hour later when he went back to check on the status of the Raid smell he discovered tiny little Ladybug carcasses all over his bed and the floor. He spent that night in the room that used to be mine with his sister and me, too tired to vacuum up their bodies.
The room that used to be mine has two twin beds that are slightly less younger than the house. The beds were used by my aunts, one of which was 87 when she passed away last year, the other who is 86 and still feisty as ever. I pushed the beds together so one of us wouldn’t fall off the tiny twin mattresses in the middle of the night. That night I had one 13-year old boy, a 5-year old girl and a 3-year-old cat curled up in the bed with me and amazingly I slept well.
On the night when the cockroach crisis occurred my daughter and I had switched rooms, moving into my late aunt’s room. My husband slept with the cat, who had to be locked in a room because my mom is allergic to cats. The door in my old room locked better than the doors to the other rooms and I have to get up and pee at night more than my husband does. I didn’t want to be chasing the cat around the house at 3 a.m. if she escaped while I went for my latest pee-pee trip.
My son ran into the room my daughter and I were in about 1 a.m. shuddering and telling me a cockroach had just fallen on him and “it was looking at me with its beady little eyes!” I told him to sleep with us but wasn’t sure if we would all fit in the full-sized bed my aunt used to sleep in. Somehow we managed to do it but the tight fit might explain why my neck hurt for the next several days after that.
One thing I’ve wondered since these bug incidents is if my son simply attracts insects. He seemed to have more interaction with the insects than any of us during our stay there and they followed him around the house as if he was the Pied Piper or the Bug Whisperer.
I”m just hoping none of those bugs followed him to the new house.
All moms struggle. All moms wonder why we don’t have “it” together, why we can’t just GET it together.
Therefore I felt only slight pity for him as he stumbled around the house like a druggie needing a fix. I began to observe him – waiting to see how manic he would become the longer he was away from YouTube and Minecraft.
For the last week, I had been laying my hand against her forehead to see if she was coming down with something, anything, looking for any reason for her Horrid Henry-like behavior. Since no fever was detected next on the list was to call the local Catholic Church to see if they still perform exorcisms in between press conferences to defend their innocence in abuse cases.
