Good Night, Sleep Tight, Don't Let the...Oops, too Late!

As you can tell from my post time it's pretty late at night (or early morning since it's 3:30am Eastern time but 12:30am Baker time). I am in Baker City Oregon visiting my Grandparents with my mother and kids. I am sitting in the motel room waiting for my mother, who is at the motel we just evacuated transferring all of our stuff into the van and bringing it over to the new motel. I had all the kids in bed and was getting ready to crawl into be myself when I looked over at Jamison and saw a small cockroach looking thing crawling across his PJ's. I grabbed a tissue to get it and when I squished it, red blood was the result.

Now I know cockroaches do not have red blood when you squish them so I asked my mom "what the heck is this?" She thought maybe some strange tick. I started freaking out because I looked at Jamison again and he had a bunch crawling on him. I started frantically picking them off and squishing them and there were blood smears on my fingers and his pajamas and skin. I squished at least 10 of these things this first round but they kept coming from somewhere and crawling on him.

I know ticks don't move this fast and I have never seen a bed bug but I realized this is what they had to be. I pulled the sheets off the corner of the mattress and it was teeming with what looked like coffee grounds, translucent buff colored moulted exoskeletons and what had to have been nymphs, larger bugs with dark reddish-brown spots on their flattened bodies and a few sizes in between. My mom had managed to pick a few more off of Jamison while I was trying to figure out where they were coming from.

Once I found the source we went into action. You have never seen two women move in sync like my mother and I did. It couldn't have been choreographed. We were able to get another room that the front desk said was newly renovated. We carried sleeping kids, Weston was awake enough to walk, through slushy snow in our PJ's. First thing I did was pull the corner of the sheets off...and they were there too! My mom went to the front desk to ask them to get us a room at another motel. While she was doing this I peeked down Jamison's PJ's and found 2 more small bed bugs and one more behind his ear. I checked Weston and Braedon but they were clean...my mother had inspected their beds and found no evidence of the little nasties. My mom came back up to the room and I ran back to the original infested room to grab jackets and shoes for Braedon since I had carried him. While I was doing that, the front desk woman came up to the new room and my mother picked off another bedbug from Jamison and showed it to her.

Once at the new motel I stripped Jamison and checked him thoroughly, putting new clothes on him. Tucked the boys into new beds and here I sit pretty shaken up from the excitement and exhaustion, writing my first action blog while my poor mom is retrieving all of our luggage and things from the original room. The woman at the front desk was so mortified, she gave us $100 to take care of the room tonight at the new motel. She also spoke to the new motel and asked them to give us the same rate we were paying at the original one. So, you know what I'm really ticked about? I am so mad that I did not have the foresight to collect several of the bedbugs for the boys' insect collection. There had to be every life stage of these bugs all contained in these mattresses and it didn't even dawn on me to collect but of course you don't think of that sort of thing when you are in Mother Bear mode.

It is a good thing to be in Mother Bear mode so once I knew my kids were fine and free of blood sucking bed bugs was when I thought of our collection and that occurred as I was waiting for my laptop to boot up. When we get going tomorrow I am going to go back and ask them if I can collect a few. I'll get some alcohol to cover them with at my grandparent's and I'll use a juice bottle to collect them with until I can get a small jar. I bet if I grab my pocket knife I can cut into the mattress and find tons (I'll ask permission first of course). I'll post pictures if I do this for sure! Wow, what a great story and specimen this is going to be for our collection! This ranks right up there with the dessicated frog Kris found behind his work bench that had the parasitic worm under the skin perfectly outlined. We still have that and that reminds me, I need to research that parasite for identification when I get the chance.