Wouldn't you know - at the end of the day after a maid had come and the house is spankin' clean, we have our first huge cockroach. Always an exciting event. Maybe in her detailed cleaning she disturbed his nest, so he was out on the hunt for a new place to call home. So last night, the kids were all in bed except for Melodie, and Corey was in the front room when he saw a big ol' roach scurry by. He called her to come aid him in the hunt and execution of the unwelcome pest. The roach went behind the coffee table and was trying to hide by the wall. I heard the fun going on and went and got the can of Raid. I got a good first shot at him as he hid, but then he ran out and took cover under where the coffee table had been moved to in the middle of the room. Mel took refuge on top of the table, I was on the east side, Corey on the west. The cockroach ran out Corey's side. Poor Corey didn't have shoes or the can of Raid and quickly hopped out of the way and I ran after the cockroach, getting poison all over the floor as I tried to hit the moving target. He ran against another wall and I almost thought I should try to step on him, but that would be too gross, so I kept coating him with white foamy poison as he tried to run. And then he got away from me behind the crate couches. Drat! So it was late at night, but we had an urgent "must-disassemble-the-couches-now!" emergency and took apart the cushions and crates in hopes of finding and finishing off the nasty creature.
Melodie was a good hunter and found him with her phone flashlight (the lights here are so dim, we can hardly see a thing once the sun goes down). He was on his back and looked pretty much dead. Yeah, take that! Die bug. We moved the crates a bit more until we were able to stick a pole between the crate slats and bat him out from under the taken apart couch. Here he is next to a pencil for size reference...
Isn't that disgusting?
Ugh, SO GROSS!!!! Cockroaches are the worst! We pushed him outside the front door where his little corpse stayed until we were able to show the other kids this morning. I mopped up the floor, Mel and I put the couch back together. I hope we don't have or see anymore. That's probably wishful thinking. We're not even 3 weeks into this adventure and have over 10 more weeks to go, odds aren't in our favor. And Corey told the kids that where you see one cockroach, there are are 100 more you haven't seen. We'll keep the Raid handy.
Some other bugs that we've thought worthy of documenting ~ here are some weird bugs.
Found these two tiny things on April 9th. I thought they were seeds of some kind but then I saw one moving. Some googling of "bug looks like seed" helped me find the right image, leading to
a website called "What's that Bug" that tells me that these bugs are called "case bearing moth larvae." That might be why I found them in our closet. I guess I better shake out our clothes regularly to make sure no moths start eating our clothes?
Corey thought they were really pathetic, giving them a C grade for overall creation design. He was glad to learn that was just the larvae stage though, cause if that was the final measure of their creation, well that would just be sad. They stick their little larvae body out and scoot themselves where they want to go. Weird bug. Then here's another one - Corey saw this one on the 11th, it was out walking across the deck by our bedroom ~
We poked it with a stick and it rolled up like an armadillo. It's a cross between a pill bug and a fuzzy caterpillar and something else... Some googling helped us and we think this might be a puss caterpillar. They supposedly live near coconut trees, and he was on the side of our house where there are coconut trees, so maybe. They are poisonous, so don't touch them! The fuzzier and friendlier they seem, the more poisonous they probably are!
Last one - here's a cool looking spider that was outside the gate, hanging out waiting for food in his web, spun in an aloe vera looking plant. It looks like it has a head with two evil red eyes on it's abdomen...
I thought he looks a little bit like one of the aliens in the Independence Day movie, ready to spring out and jump on ya with his big alien tentacles.
So that's all the weird and nasty and noteworthy bugs we've encountered thus far. Good times, good times.
