Da Bugs

Living in a not-so-tight house and being in a humid climate, we get lots of bugs. Some are common like ants, earwigs, cockroaches (although none in the house so far) millipedes, mosquitoes, and flies. But then we get a lot of bugs I’ve never seen before like flies with yellow on their wings, or bugs that look half spider, half giant ant or the super flies that flap their little wings so fast they look like small pebbles hovering in mid air. And then there’s the greatly feared giant centipedes. These carry a really painful bite and can be harmful to young children and people with bee sting allergies (So Andy and Tyler). We’ve seen 3 since we’ve moved in. Only at night time. One small one and two that were probably 5 inches long. We attack these pretty aggressively with spray and then wait for them to die before throwing them away. We also saw a cane spider on the side of our house one night. They’re fast and huge! I’m glad we don’t have any of those INSIDE the house.

That’s one thing I’m grateful to Geckos for – eating the bugs! Although I still have to spray the occasional ant pile on the counter or squish some smaller spiders, the geckos take care of pretty much everything else. They still scare the day lights out of me when they scurry out of closets or run across the wall when I turn on the lights in a room.

So my intelligent little Tyler has watched my daily encounters with bugs many times and apparently learned a few tricks. I watched him the other day play with one of those small bugs with the hard shell that can snap when they’re on their backs to launch themselves into the air and flip over. We call them the jumpy bugs, sorry I don’t know the scientific name. Tyler got a kick out of this and watched him jump over and over again. Of course I have to tell him bugs are yucky and watch him close so he doesn’t try to put it in his mouth (he’s done this with live and dead millipedes before – gross!). While he plays with the bug he keeps pointing at it and saying “Da Bug…Eww!” and giggling. Then after a few minutes of playing, very calmly he walks into the kitchen, gets one of my shoes out of the shoe bin by the back door, walks over to the bug and whacks it with my shoe repeatedly till it’s a squashed mess on the floor and walks away. He’s actually done this several times since then and has become my partner in crime for squishing all of the bugs in the house. I guess that nick name is taking on more than one meaning now.