Big Trip Aftermath

[Backstory: All that talking about a new car became research about a new car which turned into actually buying a new car. Unfortunately, the only places around the country to find our ideal Mazda CX-9 are Florida, Texas, and Virginia. Since we have friends in Virginia, and since we wanted to try a road trip this year anyway, we decided we'd buy an East Coast car, fly out to pick it up, and drive back to Oregon. It was an epic road trip which I will write a brilliant post about later. We've been dealing with the aftermath for about a week now, so I thought I'd share that while it's fresh.]

We arrived home from our First Family Road Trip around 9 PM on Tuesday, August 6. Liam, who had been pretty weirded out the entire 2.5 week trip away from home, was so thrilled when we set him down inside our own house that he just walked around with a big smile, pumping his arms and yelling "Yess!! Yess!!" We found while we'd been gone, Joseph's sweet family had harvested our peaches to keep them from being wasted and canned some for us to enjoy when we got home. We were all so happy and relieved to be back and looked forward to spending the night in our own beds again.

And then it became apparent that we were not alone.

Our house was inhabited. Not by spiders or fruit flies or ants, or any insect that people normally have to deal with. We found them clinging to our ankles only moments after we walked in the door. We knew them by the little stinging bite.

Our house was infested with fleas.

Someone who has dealt with a flea infestation before called them "the insects from hell." It's the adults you notice because they bite (and jump up to 7 inches), but they're hardly the worst of your problems. Once they've fed (on blood), females can lay 5,000 eggs in their lifetime, which can be a few months or something like 1.5 years. The eggs can take a few days or up to two weeks to hatch, so when you think you have your infestation cleared, a new batch of eggs hatch to start the cycle over again. There's also a larval stage. The larvae need to feed only on any organic material, and then they form a cocoon before developing into adults. Once they emerge from their cocoon, adult fleas need to eat within a week or they will die. If they don't emerge from their cocoons (which could be hidden anywhere from your baseboards to the underside of your furniture or on piles of junk on the floor, which we had in abundance), larval fleas can survive for months without eating, only to emerge when conditions are right and drive you mad.

Luckily, we hadn't brought anything into the house but ourselves, so we turned around, checked ourselves for fleas, and went to Joseph's parents' house to spend the night. I just HAD to try to make a dent in the population by vacuuming the house (it's a tiny house), so while everyone else was outside, I ran a vacuum over all the floors, accumulating (and summarily drowning in a nearby container of water) 30 fleas in the few minutes I was in there.

Can I take a moment to defend myself?

There is a stigma that surrounds people who deal with fleas. It seems like a terrible, uncivilized, hillbilly problem. It makes me feel like a caveman, picking fleas off myself and my children. It's the pits. Get your flea jokes in now, people, because I never want to have them again.

We weren't completely surprised to have fleas in our house. We'd found them on our dog about a week before we left and banished her outside and to the garage. When we lived in a different apartment with a different dog, we'd had a flea problem before and had developed a flea protocol that involved daily vacuuming, religious use of Frontline, and baths for the dog every other day. Once we found fleas on Nova, I began flea protocol: vacuuming daily, washing any clothes on or near the ground, bathing the dog every other day, etc. The day we left, I found a single flea in our room, but I didn't think much of it. We're leaving for two weeks, I thought. In two weeks without a host, any fleas left in the house will die. Besides, it was supposed to get very warm while we were gone, and without special care or AC, our house can heat up to 90 degrees easily. I figured that if there were fleas left, they would be cooked while we were gone. (P.S. Fleas love temperatures from 70 to 85 degrees.)

But we were wrong. Oh, so wrong. The only way to get rid of fleas is hard work and usually lots of chemicals. I couldn't deal with the chemical part because I'm four months pregnant, so my husband and two of his awesome brothers had to do the hard work. Here is how we got rid of our fleas:

Joseph bravely waded unto the breach and set off flea bombs in the house. I wish there was a way to eradicate fleas without nasty chemicals, but that would take months of wading in to sprinkle diatomaceous earth, vacuum it up, clear everything out, wipe all the surfaces down, repeating the process many times and for an untold amount of money (and without living in the house), and we just don't have that kind of time. So flea bombs it was. After the initial bombing, Joseph and his two awesome brothers (I'm frequently glad I married into this family, but when you need it, their amazing work ethic is particularly incredible!) moved everything out of the house that wasn't bolted to a wall. Have I mentioned I'm a pile-r? I like to keep things we probably don't need (Free samples of things, old magazines, construction paper Diana might want to use when she's five and can handle scissors...), and since our house isn't finished and has no storage, there are piles in every room. It drives Joseph nuts, but he mostly puts up with it. Anyway, they went in and cleared out all the junk and piles and every item that could be washed and moved it outside. Furniture went in a U-Haul to protect it from the elements. Then they set off more flea bombs in every room of the house, including the garage and the attic. After giving those time to air out, they went back and vacuumed, then mopped all the floors. Before moving each item of furniture into the house, they sprayed and cleaned it. Nothing was moved back into the house without being thoroughly cleaned first. The mattress we'd been sleeping on was on box springs on the floor and was probably over 15 years old anyway, so we had to make the surprise purchase of a new bed. New beds are wonderful but EXPENSIVE! We moved back in Thursday night, but we had no curtains, bedsheets, pillows, towels, etc. because I hadn't washed them. Aside from the six or seven loads of laundry I was able to finish at home, we basically took over the local laundromat one Saturday and washed nine 13 gallon trash bags full of laundry. I washed every dish, utensil, pot, pan, glass, etc. in our kitchen. It's not the cleaning items that is particularly tedious. It's the fact that in order to put that item back where it belongs, you have to empty the drawer or shelf of other contaminated items, then wipe that down, then put your clean item away. Then you can clean the rest and put those in the same place. I've been wiping down walls where kids can touch them, doors, bookshelves, drawers, counters, appliances... places you don't even think about until you consider them contaminated and know that little hands and mouths will be exploring them. So many surfaces to clean! And quite frankly it all worries me a little bit anyway just because I'm pregnant, not in the first trimester, but it's still a little early.

So, if we seemed to fall off the face of the earth after already being away for two and a half weeks, it's because we did, into flea hell, a land of chemicals and endless cleaning. I won't be ready to say we've won for another few weeks, but so far we haven't seen any fleas in the house. Obviously, when we pick the dog up from where she stayed while we were gone, she will have to be outdoor-only until I can completely control the fleas on her too. We've been very careful about applying Frontline every month, so I'm not sure how she picked up fleas. Someone who dealt with an infestation earlier this year said the exterminator told them even then that it was going to be a bad year for fleas in our area. Since Nova isn't really around other dogs, I can only imagine she picked them up from the yard or the grassy area behind Joseph's office.

I can't wait until I've folded these eight bags of laundry (at least that's a chore I enjoy), put everything away, wiped down all contaminated surfaces and we can get back to enjoying life in our little house. On the bright side, my piles were all cleaned for me (mostly into the trash) and we have a new bed, but it's still a lot of work! Has anyone else had to deal with these awful parasites?

P.S. You can't catch fleas by reading about them on a computer screen, but I understand if you don't want to be friends anymore. :P