Disturbed

If you know me well, and especially if you've ever lived with me, you know that I DESPISE COCKROACHES. I think they are absolutely vile. No one likes roaches, but I didn't hate them with such passion until the summer I lived in Kentucky and my apartment was crawling with them. Click here if you want to read more details about my life as the roaches' roomie (and why wouldn't you?). Good times.

I know it's irrational but one of things I like about new houses is that they seem less likely to have bugs, specifically roaches. In my head, if I start out with a new house and always keep it clean, maybe the roaches will never sniff their way in. But in an older house, there are who knows how many layers of other people's filth in dark corners I can't reach to clean, and roaches are inevitable.

Again, I know it's not that simple. All houses have some bugs. I'm not hating on old houses.

The first couple of months we lived in our current house I saw virtually no bugs at all and no roaches. I even mentioned this to Matt. Jinx! In a matter of days several generously proportioned roaches made their presence known (all are dead now).

But last week a terrible thing happened. I was about to use the bathroom when I noticed a HUGE roach just chilling inside the toilet bowl, right above the water line! Seriously. I mean, seriously. The garage, sure; the kitchen floor, if you must; but my toilet is off limits, roaches!

I was afraid if I just flushed it it would swim right back up. They are called "water bugs" for a reason. So I drowned it in wasp spray, slammed the toilet lid down, and locked the bathroom door from the inside so Claire wouldn't get into any of that while I went upstairs to put Evan down for his nap. Matt cleaned it all up when he got home. Thanks, babe.

I remain disproportionately shaken. So much for peeing in the middle of the night without turning the light on. So much for comfortably sitting on a toilet seat, for that matter -- now I know what could be lurking inches away, and those things are fast! I need to get to the bottom of this situation.

The first thing I want to do is get the bajillion cardboard boxes out of our garage (boxes and paper grocery bags are breeding grounds for roaches, I've heard). We've been saving every "good" box that comes our way since we'll need them for moving in a few months, and they're really adding up. To be honest, our garage looks like something out of "Hoarders" right now. So we need to move them to the storage building.

Another option (thanks, Lauren G.) is to have the pros come and spray. The potential problem with that is that Evan is all over this house and if he discovers a dead roach it WILL go in his mouth. So I don't know. Probably I should just get mentally tough about roaches. If I talked myself into being unticklish for a year in high school, I should be able to do that.