Battle of the Bugs!

During our first week here, I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that there were no crazy large bugs. I was afraid that there would be giant bugs because of the humidity and I was thrilled that I hadn’t had to fight any. Well, that all changed in our second week. On Monday night, after everyone in the house was asleep, Mackenzie and I found a giant centipede in the kitchen heading straight for our room. This thing was probably 4 inches long and super creepy as it wiggled back and forth across the floor. Mackenzie and had to make a game plan because we afraid that if we just squished it with a shoe its guts would go everywhere, so we got some Kleenex and put them on the floor so that we could lure the centipede over the tissue. We then wrapped Mackenzie’s show in toilet paper so that all the guts would be contained. This seemed like a really good plan. The centipede was moving very slowly, so we thought it wouldn’t be a problem to catch him while he was on the kleenex.

Unfortunately, the reason he was moving so slowly was that he had no traction on our tile floor, so the second he was on the tissue, he zipped across super fast. I screamed and jumped back. We contemplated waking up mama who was asleep on the couch, but decided we probably couldn’t make her understand why were afraid of this “little” bug. We also cursed the dog for being good for nothing when we just wanted him to eat it. After we collected ourselves again, I put the tissue in front of the centipede again, poised for my attack and smashed him as soon as he got on the tissue. He was so tough that I could see his butt wiggling still, so I put most of my weight on Mackenzie’s shoe for several minutes and when it stopped twitching I let up, collected the kleenexes and toilet paper and went to bed. We were safe once again. The next morning we told Nanay Pipay about the incident and she told us about how poisonous centipedes are and that being bitten by one is as bad as being stung by a scorpion! That would have been nice to know before I put my fingers right in front of it to make it crawl on a tissue, but everything turned out ok and we all had a good laugh at our ridiculous antics.

The next day, when we were in our bedroom, I picked up my backpack to get something out of it and saw an entire army of ants swarming all over it. While not nearly as scary as the poisonous centipede, it was still very frustrating. Mackenzie and I spent the next hour lifting up bags, shoes, and anything else on our floor to find swarms of them. We killed as many as possible, but the fact that you have to “kill” each one about 3 times before it actually dies did not help. We eventually decided that we had reduced their numbers enough for one night and we went to bed. They haven’t been too much of a problem since then, but they are still everywhere in our house, including in one of my bags of breakfast cereal. Stupid ants! I think I prefer the centipede. At least he is destructible.

Wednesday proved to be just as eventful. After Nanay Pipay had gone to bed, Mackenzie and I were getting ready for bed when 2 giant cockroaches attacked me as I was coming out of the bathroom. Mackenzie is willing to take on any bugs with me except cockroaches. I on the other hand, just think they are funny because of a cockroach incident I was part of in New Orleans several years ago when I got to laugh while my beloved youth group girls screamed and tried to attack 4 cockroaches with brooms. I didn’t have any idea what to do to kill these cockroaches however because I could not start whacking the walls with brooms. I was trying very hard to figure out how to protect Mackenzie while not waking anyone else. Thank goodness, Nanay Lucy walked into the room and laughed at me as I told her about the cockroaches. She whacked one of them with a broom and it fell to floor where she stepped on it, and went back to bed. I was just amazed how easy it had been. I told Mackenzie she was safe, but she refused to leave her room until I found and hunted down the other one. I eventually found him in the bathroom, whacked him with a shoe, and flushed him down the toilet (which was very difficult since cockroaches float and our toilet is just a toilet bowl that you pour water down to make things go away.) Unfortunately, I was not able to protect Mackenzie from the cockroach that found her the next day in the bathroom and crawled under her toe, but she survived. Since then, we have faced no giant bugs and I’m just praying that no giant spiders come. I can handle any of these other bugs, but a giant spider would send me scurrying into my mosquito net which gives you a delightfully false sense that nothing can get to you as long as your remain within it. I don’t really want to test that security.

Recently our only critter stories involve geckos and mice. We have two geckos that live in our house that we have become particularly attached to. The first is Joseph, our super tiny lizard who is about 1 inch long and lives in the headboards above the doorway into Mackenzie’s and my room. The other is Ozzy, a purple gecko, who is evidently poisonous, who lives in the shower. I love the geckos and Nanay Pipay said we could grab one (not one of the poisonous ones) and play with it before we leave!

Also, last week at school, a mouse got into our classroom on the one day when Mam Maricar wasn’t there, so Mackenzie and I were teaching 2^nd and 3^rd grade. Mackenzie had been looking for something in the teacher’s desk when the mouse appeared. She screamed and jumped and all the students jumped up and followed after it while Mackenzie went to get the first grade teacher, Mam Mary Grace. Mam Mary Grace didn’t know how to get rid of the mouse, so the 3^rd grade boys grabbed some toy bats that the class has and started chasing it around the room. They eventually chased it into the 1^st grade room and then outside. All the children just kept laughing and I was just glad that they were not afraid of it. Our children really have no fear of bugs or animals, probably because they live in the country. One of our boys punched a bug out of the air the other day and managed to step on it while it fell to the ground. I love our kids.