If you are not up on your Finding Nemo dialogue, then you won't recognize that tonight's title is a direct quote. If you are not up on your Doxology Mine, then you won't remember from the last post that E got Nemo for her birthday and has watched it an embarrassing number of times since.
Anyway, that whole first paragraph is completely irrelevant to the story I want to tell you tonight, except that "Have the animals all gone mad?!" was all I could think upon returning home from church.
And by "animals" I mean insects. Read on.
So la-dee-dah, I get home before Tony around 9:30 p.m. and have to do the Single Parent Struggle of how to transfer each kid from car to house. I take E in first, and plop her screaming on the couch. "MOM-MYYY!" Like I'm turning my back on her and leaving her there forever abandoned, instead of what I'm actually doing, which is walking the three feet back to the car to haul Judah--and his 200-lb. carseat--in. So I go get Buddy Man and bring him in and put him on the ground and proceed to close the blinds. I get to the third one and feel a searing burn on my shoulder. Ok, maybe not searing, but I've never been stung before, and I was getting s-t-u-n-g. So I flail about for a bit (determinedly keeping my mouth shut and my screams silent for the sake of my impressionable children--I know, I'm such a good mom), and hear some disconcertingly angry buzzing. The burning gets a little worse and then out of my sleeve falls a wasp. I then use the only thing handy to smush it, which also happens to be the worst possible thing to smush wasps. A rubber ball. I rolled it over that thing a million times and it still pitifully struggled to survive. I then started to feel sorry for it, because it only stung me because it felt trapped and it wasn't being "mean" and stinging is the defense mechanism God gave it and all it got it was killed, blah blah blah. So then I have to justify the wasp-murder in my mind. It could have, would have stung my kids. I had to kill it. For the sake of my innocent children, the wasp had to die.
Go ahead and shake your heads. Just telling you the whole story. I know it's just a wasp. Whatever.
So anyway, I sit down to feed Judah and periodically make sure I can still raise my arm above my head and that my esophagus isn't closing up. Like I said, I've never been stung before. I didn't want Tony coming home to a comatose wife. I don't think his heart could recover from such a sight. He would never forget that night. Not for the rest of his life. He'd never be right.
Ok, I think I'm finished. Sorry.
Needless to say, I am alive or I wouldn't be writing this. But that was not the only time our lives were threatened in this house tonight! Shall I tell on?
So Tony gets home and is getting around to giving kids baths and I'm sitting in our room on the computer. Elizabeth runs in laughing like she does when she's a little excited/scared. I hear Tony say, "Rach, come look at this scorpion-looking bug!" So I go in there to find...noooo, it's not a bug, it's a scorpion. An actual, real-life, I-thought-scorpions-were-deadly-poisonous-manflesheaters-only-found-in-the-desert scorpion. WHAT?! What is a scorpion doing in my house? UPSTAIRS! In my son's room! Have all the animals/insects gone mad?
The answer is apparently yes. They must be crazy if they think they can enter this house and live. Because they can't. And they didn't.
And I must say, scorpions have a lot more guts to squish in a carpet when you smash them to tiny atoms than regular earwigs or spindly spiders. Oh yeah, and they're also A LOT MORE TERRIFYING.
Anyway, that whole first paragraph is completely irrelevant to the story I want to tell you tonight, except that "Have the animals all gone mad?!" was all I could think upon returning home from church.
And by "animals" I mean insects. Read on.
So la-dee-dah, I get home before Tony around 9:30 p.m. and have to do the Single Parent Struggle of how to transfer each kid from car to house. I take E in first, and plop her screaming on the couch. "MOM-MYYY!" Like I'm turning my back on her and leaving her there forever abandoned, instead of what I'm actually doing, which is walking the three feet back to the car to haul Judah--and his 200-lb. carseat--in. So I go get Buddy Man and bring him in and put him on the ground and proceed to close the blinds. I get to the third one and feel a searing burn on my shoulder. Ok, maybe not searing, but I've never been stung before, and I was getting s-t-u-n-g. So I flail about for a bit (determinedly keeping my mouth shut and my screams silent for the sake of my impressionable children--I know, I'm such a good mom), and hear some disconcertingly angry buzzing. The burning gets a little worse and then out of my sleeve falls a wasp. I then use the only thing handy to smush it, which also happens to be the worst possible thing to smush wasps. A rubber ball. I rolled it over that thing a million times and it still pitifully struggled to survive. I then started to feel sorry for it, because it only stung me because it felt trapped and it wasn't being "mean" and stinging is the defense mechanism God gave it and all it got it was killed, blah blah blah. So then I have to justify the wasp-murder in my mind. It could have, would have stung my kids. I had to kill it. For the sake of my innocent children, the wasp had to die.
Go ahead and shake your heads. Just telling you the whole story. I know it's just a wasp. Whatever.
So anyway, I sit down to feed Judah and periodically make sure I can still raise my arm above my head and that my esophagus isn't closing up. Like I said, I've never been stung before. I didn't want Tony coming home to a comatose wife. I don't think his heart could recover from such a sight. He would never forget that night. Not for the rest of his life. He'd never be right.
Ok, I think I'm finished. Sorry.
Needless to say, I am alive or I wouldn't be writing this. But that was not the only time our lives were threatened in this house tonight! Shall I tell on?
So Tony gets home and is getting around to giving kids baths and I'm sitting in our room on the computer. Elizabeth runs in laughing like she does when she's a little excited/scared. I hear Tony say, "Rach, come look at this scorpion-looking bug!" So I go in there to find...noooo, it's not a bug, it's a scorpion. An actual, real-life, I-thought-scorpions-were-deadly-poisonous-manflesheaters-only-found-in-the-desert scorpion. WHAT?! What is a scorpion doing in my house? UPSTAIRS! In my son's room! Have all the animals/insects gone mad?
The answer is apparently yes. They must be crazy if they think they can enter this house and live. Because they can't. And they didn't.
And I must say, scorpions have a lot more guts to squish in a carpet when you smash them to tiny atoms than regular earwigs or spindly spiders. Oh yeah, and they're also A LOT MORE TERRIFYING.
Since then, I have googled "scorpions in Georgia" (that's right, folks, I live in Georgia, not Mexico, not the Sahara, not any of the places I thought scorpions were limited to), and found that the Little Southern Devil scorpion (rightly named, I thought) is actually fairly common in this state. So add that to the list of things I didn't need to know.
It's 11:32 now and the hullabaloo has died down and everyone is asleep and hopefully dreaming scorpion-less dreams. I'm still awake and praying everyone has scorpion-less beds.
It's an eventful night when animals go mad and it's downright deadly when insects go mad. Even when they're not poisonous in the slightest.
5 comments:
I love reading your stories, you should write a book,
love Mom
Rachel,
I agree with you mom, you have the gift of writing. I love reading your blog. They are little short stories :)
Lydia
ugh. ugh. ugh. one time a centipede woke me up in the middle of the night by CRAWLING ACROSS MY FACE!! This was in college. Needless to say, I slept on the couch for approximately 3 days after that. AND insisted that the landlord get an exterminator IMMEDIATELY!
hahahahaha... i laughed the whole time i read your post. NOT because of what happened to you, but because of how you tell it. way to go in squashing those bugs. please tell them to all go away for the party :)
I hope you got over your scare with the scorpion. When I was a little girl my mom made my dad move from a house because of those things. I think you were really kind to call them creatures. Incidentally, you can really spin a yarn.
Love,
Toni Jo
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