Bugs

I don’t know what’s going on, but lately we have been seeing a lot of bugs.  A few weeks ago, ants decided that they wanted to move in with us. Now, I'm not talking about one or two ants. I'm talking a whole freaking tribe! And they weren't the little ants either. They were the big black ones. Now, these ants are big enough that if you really wanted to kill them, all you have to do is either step on it or swat it with a newspaper. Easy, right? Well, not for my daughter. Whenever she would see an ant, she wouldn’t kill it. She said that she didn’t like the sound it made when she stepped on it.  So instead, she would come and get me to kill it for her. I was  her personal exterminator.  

Eventually, I bought a can of raid and sprayed the perimeter of the kitchen, dining room, and living room. Thank God it  was lavender scented because I over sprayed. I sprayed so much Raid that I had to open the windows to air out the house. It worked though.  The ants were gone in a matter of days. I guess the scout ant went back to their colony and advised his fellow ants that this house was off limits. The only problem was that now I had little dead ants everywhere and I hate sweeping! Well, that wasn't the only problem. Any other bug that decided to check out my house as a potential home would turn up dead. Honestly, I never knew so many bugs in Brooklyn. My boss reminded me that the bugs were displaced due to all the construction going on in my neighborhood.  They needed somewhere to go. I can understand that, but they didn’t have to come over here! 

So, once the ants left, the flies came for a visit!  Amazingly, my daughter had no problem killing flies. Apparently, they annoyed her more than the ants. She would go after the files like she had personal vendetta against them.  It was funny to watch. She would get one of my magazines, roll it up, and start swinging in the air.  I didn’t know if she was killing flies or playing tennis.  Either way, she celebrated every time she killed one.
 
Oh, and we can’t forget the water bugs.  IHATE water bugs. They come in all shapes and sizes. They scare both me and my daughter because they show up when we’re not expecting them, and they are so big. I hate killing them. You know, when you step on an ant, it makes a nice smallcrunch sound. Not water bugs.  They make a loudcrunch sound.  Yuck!  My daughter will not go near them. In fact, when she sees one, she won’t even go back downstairs unless I'm with her. To be honest, I'm not too keen on going down there either, but since I'm the parent, and my son is now away in college, and neither my daughter or I have boyfriends, I have no choice but to go downstairs and kill it myself. 

The one good thing about water bugs is that for the most part, they will eventually die on their own. The bad part is that they usually decide to do it in the middle of the floor, in the living room or  in the kitchen. For the life of me, I don't understand why they just won't go outside and die. Why must they die inside? No one wants to see a dead water bug laying on the floor.  If one is on the floor when my daughter gets home from school, she just leaves it there. Then, when she hears me come home from work, she will stand at the top of the staircase and yell, "Mommy, I don't want to alarm you (of course that ALWAYS alarms me), but there's a dead bug on the floor."  No matter how many times I tell her that all she has to do is sweep it up and put it in the trash, she will not do it. I constantly remind her that next year she will be in college and have to deal with bugs herself. She just tells me that her roommate will have to deal with them. I wish I could be a fly on the wall when she and her future roommate encounters their first bug sighting. 
 
Anyway, you better hope you don't have squeamish kids. If you do, you'll be the one stuck with dealing with the bugs. 
 
So, now you know, and you can ... Consider Yourself Warned!

Parents out there, what are your kids squeamish about?