there isn't a single trip to the outdoors (even walking from the back door to the van) when love does not find some sort of bug. it makes me happy to see her so excited about the them. the world is truly her classroom as she holds and examines bugs. it is fun to watch.
a (dead) eyed click beetle we found on a walk
cicada
hardwood stump borer beetle, i think
one afternoon love and i went out to water the plants on the front porch, and there were two HUGE beetles on the porch. thanks to a google search, i believe they were hardwood stump borer beetles. love immediately went over and picked one up and was thrilled to have it crawling on her hand. if i would have looked more closely, i would have seen that it had large pinchers, but i didn't, and it pinched her finger. she shrieked and waved her hand around and it let go. i thought she would be traumatized, but she recovered quickly and it has not dampened her enthusiasm for bugs one bit.
discovering the beetles
and seconds before the pinch... :(
i don't mind most of the bugs very much...the beetles, ladybugs, cicadas, and various insects. i share love's excitement when we find a bug, even if i really find it gross, because that's what mamas do (although i mostly leave it up to love to pick them up and hold them). i also think it's so cool that she loves bugs so much, and i don't want to influence her or dampen her enthusiasm for them. for the most part, she is really gentle in handling bugs, and we talk a lot about how to treat them kindly and respectfully.
...but the cockroaches. oh, those really get me. since living here, i have {unfortunately} learned all kinds of interesting (?) facts about cockroaches. i now know that they can run 3 mph, live without their heads for three weeks, and even survive for a while by only eating the glue off of postage stamps (can you believe someone actually wasted moments of their life figuring that out?). it's more than i ever wanted to know about cockroaches. we have encountered a few of them in our house and now i am paranoid about them. every time i walk into a room i do a quick cockroach scan, i wear shoes in the house at all times because i am terrified i will step on one with bare feet, and i have all our food carefully stored in hopes to deter them from wanting to make our house their home.
i have fears that one will crawl on me while i am sleeping...fears that were only made worse when i found one laying on it's back twitching RIGHT NEXT TO my side of the bed.
i think what really gets me about cockroaches is that they can run so fast, and the sound of their little feet running across the wood floor...ew, just ew!
i think we have had seven(?) cockroach encounters since we moved in. three were right after we moved in, so i figured they probably came in while we were moving in.
then there was the evening we were sitting on the couch watching a movie. jeremy was rubbing my back and we were relaxed. and then jeremy stopped rubbing my back, sat up a bit, and said he had to "take care of something a minute". i immediately knew it was a cockroach. sure enough...just on the other side of the room. jeremy stood up to get a big shoe, and before we knew it, the roach ran right under the couch i was still sitting on. i jumped up immediately, and i will even admit that i ran across the room and jumped on a chair. jeremy moved the couch, the furniture around the couch, and the couch cushions, but we never found the roach (it must have gone in the vent that is right behind the couch). seeing a cockroach and killing it? slightly traumatizing. seeing a cockroach, not killing it, and knowing that it is inside your house somewhere? ten times worse. ew, ew, ew. and then several days later it happened again (maybe the same one?). now we ALWAYS sit with a big shoe just within reach, just in case.
since moving here, i have learned that there is something here even worse than just a plain old cockroach...there is the palmetto bug. it's like a gigantic cockroach that can fly. thankfully, we have not encountered any of these in our house (i don't know if i would survive such an encounter!), but we have seen them flying around our lights outside. the first week we were here, jeremy was doing laundry (which involves going out our back door and walking under the carport to the storage closet) and a huge bug was flying around out there. huge, as in, the size of a small mouse. jeremy walked back and forth with a big piece of cardboard ready to swat the thing if it attacked him (i giggled, but only because i was inside looking out the window!). since then, we have both decided that it is not worth it to do laundry after dark. anyway, once we learned about palmetto bugs, we knew that's what it was.
i don't have any photos of cockroaches, and never will. i also should really stop doing online searches to identify the bugs we find because then i have to look at photos of tons of giant bugs that we haven't even seen yet! eek!
First of all, Love has such blond hair! Blonder than I remember. I love the first picture of her. Glad she's a tough girl about those awful giant bugs. I'm certainly not. Roaches IN the house are horrible, but is it more common down there in bugland? Maybe your neighbors could tell you. I also heard (and this could be a myth) that if you smack the roach, its eggs fly everywhere. Is that true?? As for your vent, I would staple or nail down some finer mesh over the vent to keep the bugs out and the air in. Eeekk!
ReplyDelete--Rebekah