Back on Superbowl Sunday, about 30 minutes prior to kickoff, Martin did a face plant in the middle of the family room and broke one of his upper front teeth. It didn’t bleed much and he was fine after a few minutes. That week we took him to see his dentist who then referred us to a specialist. The specialist took some xrays and recommended that we do a root canal to reduce the risk of it abscessing. Since (at the time) he was under 2 years old, it require that he be put under general anesthesia at a hospital for the procedure. We scheduled it for the first week in May. Two things happened during this period.

The first was that we caught a lot of grief from some friends and family for performing a root canal on a two year old. This upset us because we obviously didn’t *want* to do this, but believed it was the right thing to do. More on this later.
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In May of 2005, I posted a couple of pictures that I took of Billy after being bitten by bedbugs. That prompted a few questions from people about how we got rid of them. With the growing awareness of bedbugs and their comeback, I thought I’d finally tell our story.

Back in July of 2002, we were getting ready for our annual trip to the beach. About a week before we left, we noticed bug bites on Billy’s legs. This didn’t seem unusual since he spent alot of time playing outside. After returning from the beach, we noticed that they weren’t getting any better. Instead they seemed to be spreading up his body. We took him to a doc-in-the-box and he was diagnosed with chickenpox. It didn’t look like chickenpox to me, but I wasn’t the doctor. After a week, he wasn’t improving so we took him to his pediatrician. Instead of chickenpox, they thought it was some kind of allergy so they referred us to an allergist.

Over a period of ten weeks, they performed various allergy tests (yes, the scratch tests), multiple times and concluded that he had a wheat allergy and put him on a no wheat diet. For those who don’t know, wheat is in just about EVERYTHING. About the fourth day into the no wheat diet, I was waking Billy up for daycare and noticed something move on his bed out of the corner of my eye. I quickly turned on the lights (it was still dark) and at first couldn’t find anything. Later that day, I mentioned it to my mom. She did a bit of checking on the web and came up with bedbugs and suggested I look into it. I did a bit of research and found that bedbugs shed their skin like a snake and will leave little husks around. I searched Billy’s room with a flashlight and, bam, I found husks. Unfortunately the fun was just beginning.

Still not completely believing in bedbugs, I took the husks to the local branch of the Virginia Cooperative Extension. They weren’t sure what kind of insect it was so they had it sent off. Over the next few day I continued to gather information about bedbugs. I learned quite a bit about bedbugs and their history and, sure enough, the extension office confirmed that they were bedbugs.

During this time, Billy slept in our room while we tried to figure out what to do. After inspecting the room, I concluded that the bed was the primary source of infestation. The extension office wasn’t sure how to treat them since nobody had been having problems. Since my mom worked in new construction, she new the name of a pest control company that she thought would help us out. They gave me a pesticide that they thought would do the trick. We were supposed to brush this stuff all over the bed. I recalling thinking that this wasn’t going to work, because the chemical was a salt based product used for wood boring insects. I assumed the pest people knew better than I did. We did two things. The first thing we did was wipe EVERYTHING in Billy’s room down with rubbing alcohol. Stuff (like stuffed animals) that couldn’t be easily inspected was thrown away. The second thing we did was take the bed downstairs and brush the pesticide all over it. This had the lovely side effect of eating away all the varnish.

A quick note about the bed. This bed is a family antique that belonged to my great grandmother and it was/is important to me to preserve it. Anything else would have been torched.

Since all the varnish was gone, I had to re-varnish the bed. Since it’s an old bed, the joints were loose, there were all sorts of nooks and crannies for bedbugs to get into. But between the pesticide and the varnish, I thought that would definitely take care of it. Martinah was nervous about Billy sleeping in his room that first night. I was confident that we’d taken care of the problem. The next morning I took these pictures.

I contacted the pest control place again and they said we would have to fumigate the house. A couple of days later they came and did the house. The day I was able to go back in, I went straight to Billy’s room and found live bedbugs on the mattress. I took the bed out of the house for good and had them come and fumigate the house again.

This time I could find no evidence of living bedbugs. We bought Billy a toddler bed and I filled every seam, nook and cranny with clear caulk. I put glue traps under each bed leg and Vaseline on the base of each bed leg. (I had read that they would get trapped in the trap or the Vaseline. I also read later that they are smart enough to crawl up the wall to the ceiling and drop down too, but I didn’t know that at the time.) About a month went by and we didn’t find a single bug or have a single bite. We were in the clear… or so we thought.

One morning Martinah woke up with a cluster of welts on her leg. I’d seen this before: bedbugs. I inspected our room and found one single bug which I immediately disposed of. Since I couldn’t find any other evidence, we took a wait and see approach. Fortunately, we have never found any more.

We never did come to a concrete conclusion on where they came from. By the time we figured out what was going on, there was little evidence to indicate where they started. For a while we thought somehow they came in on the bed since it had been in storage. However, there wouldn’t be any reason for them to be in the bed in the first place without a food source. We had gone to the Bahamas (Martinah and I) that spring, but we never had an infestation in our room (just the one bug). Nobody at daycare had reported anything so that didn’t seem a likely source either. That will probably go unsolved.

To this day, anytime any of us gets a bug bite, the hair on my neck stands up. It was never painful. Billy still isn’t aware of what happened and doesn’t remember a thing. But for Martinah and I, it was very traumatic. However, I do feel we were VERY lucky. I’ve read stories of people having pest control treat 5 or 6 times before they were eliminated.

Some factoids:

• bedbugs can live for a year and a half without eating
• bite marks look like mosquito bites but are generally in a line or are clustered
• they will leave little red stains on the sheets where they have traveled
• they like to hide during the day
• they are attracted to carbon dioxide and and can detect it from about 15 feet away
• they like to hitchhike on blankets and clothes
• they like to live in nooks and crannies in furniture, behind pictures, wallpaper, and baseboards
• they don’t fly and like to stay close to their food source
• they are very hardy and are difficult to kill in quantity
• they are unlikely carriers of disease, although I’ve read that they can transmit Hepatitis B in rare circumstances

Some links:

• Bed Bugs
• The Bedbug, a Pestilence of the Night, Is Back and Biting
• The Bug Clinic

Yesterday evening, Billy told us that he didn’t want to wear a jacket that we bought for him anymore. When we asked why, in a very serious tone, he told us that they took animals and cut off their skin and made jackets out of them.

So, we had to have the “where hamburger comes from” talk. We informed him that some people hunted, sometimes animals were used for food, and that some people don’t eat animals at all.

We told him that we wanted him to make up his own mind about the subject. When we got to the part about how vegetarians didn’t eat hamburgers or hotdogs, his mind was made up. The look on his face when he heard that vegetarians only eat vegetables was priceless.

Martin has started on solid food. Well, sorta. We start with applesauce (hardly a solid food) and mix with a pinch of drool as it falls out of the front of his mouth.

Yesterday, we were talking about nicnames and three of the names that I call Martin are Stinky, Martian and Monkey Feet. We thought it was pretty cool how they sounded when put together.

Well, this morning he lived up to the name. Yesterday we brought down from the attic an entertainment thingamajig that he sits in and can spin around and play. He really seems to be enjoying it. After feeding him this morning, I put him in it. After a few minutes I noticed that he had dropped a bomb. Martinah went over to change him and halted with an “OH MY GOD!” I look over and it had run down his leg all over the bottom deck after which he had put his feet in it and got it EVERYWHERE. While trying to get him cleaned up, which was a team effort, I actually had to pick him and hold him upside down while we disrobed and cleaned him.

Sticky Martian Monkey Feet is right.

Last night our youngest son (3 1/2 months old) had his first temper-tantrum. At 8:00, Martinah took him up to bed and he started fussing. That isn’t unusual and normally stops after a few minutes. Not last night. After 15 minutes, he was announcing to the world what kind of cruel parents we were and ended up screaming so loud that I thought for sure something was wrong. The second I picked him up, he stopped crying, looked at me and smiled as if to say “Gotcha!”

Tonight I had the lovely job of extracting two splinters from my son’s hand. It took 60 minutes, a gallon of tears and every reverse psychology trick I could think of to finally get him to sit still. Every time I would get ready to remove one he would stall. Here is the list of reasons:

• Can I say something?
• I need to go to the bathroom.
• I want to give mommy a hug.
• I want to give YOU a hug.
• Can we turn off the lights?
• Why do you have to use tweezers?
• Can mommy sit next to me?
• My legs are cold.
• I need to go to the bathroom.
• I want to give you a hug again.
• Can we just leave it?
• Why will it get infected?

Rinse and repeat.

Would you believe that later he said it wasn’t that bad?