Stage 5 Clingers

Let me tell you about my weekend.
It started off well enough. I hit the road for St. Louis with my dancing diva, an extra dancing diva and my partner in crime for the weekend, a fellow insane dance mom. We had 72 pounds of costume and makeup, 3 gallons of industrial strength hairspray, extra eyelashes for any false eyelash emergency and enough snacks to feed a platoon of soldiers. It was wheels to the pavement at 315 pm Friday afternoon.
We arrived early enough to check into the hotel before going to the venue. As is always my routine, I stripped the beds of their bedding, lifted and checked the mattress and box springs and around the headboard. I am not interested in sharing my bed with crawly things that I didn’t give birth to. And we were still early to the venue. She make-upped, she danced beautifully and it was marvelous. Just after 1130 we all collapsed into a hotel bed.
I slept very little. Sharing a full size bed with two other overheating bedhogs is not my idea of comfort. In addition to squeezing my not small self into approximately 2 square feet of bed space, our door rattled every time someone walked by it, or used the elevator, or sneezed from the floor below. So I spent most of Friday night and early Saturday morning thinking that someone was trying to bust in and steal the dance costumes, or my cheez-its.
We spent all of Saturday lounging around the hotel and the girls swam and we ate snacks and spread our stuff all over the hotel room. All over. We had completely emptied the car of all luggage and clothes and bags and shoes. It was all in the hotel room.
Now, flash forward to Sunday morning. 5 am. I wake up when my phone starts to sing Welcome to the Jungle. As I come out of my coma I realize that I feel itchy. My arm feels itchy and my finger itches and I look at my thumb and it has a large swollen puffy bite on it. Damn. Something bit me in my sleep. Probably a spider. I slither out of bed and turn on the light in the bathroom so I can shower and I see that my entire right forearm is covered in bites.
MOTHER TRUCKER, SON OF A CARROT STICK, SWEET NIBLETS AND HOLY CRAP.
BEDBUGS
I get the rest of the room up, and examine my two daughters who were sleeping in bed with me. Abbey has a cluster of bites on her shoulder. Maddy is untouched. I yank back all the covers and begin going over everything every fold, every crease. I know it can’t be anything else, but I CHECKED DAMNIT. I know what to look for. I CHECKED. And then I find one, one little tiny bastard about the size of a pin head, reddish in color, but definitely a bedbug.
And so it begins.
I compose myself and set everyone else in motion, getting ready for the day, because we still have approximately 13 hours of dancing to survive before we head for home. I go the front desk and explain the situation. I take my unwanted room guest with me and plop him down on the counter to emphasize my displeasure. I am alarmed at the clerk’s lack of alarm. This tells me she’s handled this issue before. She assures me that the manager will call me as soon as she gets in at 8.
I return to the room and begin containment protocol. Everything into plastic bags. Everything that will fit, that is. Unfortunately, my dancer possesses the GRAND MASTER of dream duffels. It holds up to 12 costumes, and measures 3 feet wide, 2 feet deep and 2 feet high. It doesn’t fit in a trash bag. I say a tiny little prayer to the patron saint of dancers, Saint Capezio. I do a little worship dance to the Maybelline gods and hope that the costume holding monstrosity doesn’t harbor any blood sucking hitchhikers. We escape the Hotel Infestation at 7 and arrive at the venue. I have decided to not go announcing to the universe that we were set upon by bedbugs and I begin to go about getting ready to be Dance Mom Niki for the day.
“Oh my god Niki. I can’t believe you have bedbugs in your room. That’s so awful.” Says one of the dance coaches as she comes into the dressing room. Well crap. One of my co-conspirators spilled the beans. I probably should have told them we weren’t talking about it.
So for the next 13 hours, we change makeup, we change hair, we watch dance, we watch awards. Abbey and I scratch ourselves like crazy and I plan for our return home. We go to Walgreens and get some pesticide. We spray everything already in the car, and we spray everything going into the car.
Finally. It’s 9pm and it’s time to go home. WOOT!!!
3 and a half hours later, we’re home, the girls are sleeping and it’s 41 degrees outside. We stumble out of the car and I remind them we have to take our clothes off outside. The garage door is open, the lights are on and there we are, stripping down before we go inside. They sprint off to bed. I put some sweats on and start unloading the car.
45 minutes later the car is unloaded. I marvel at the amount of stuff I had fit into my Toyota Sienna. I am clearly an expert at packing efficiency. I find myself standing in the garage staring at the pile of stuff. I shake off my fog and grab the can of pesticide spray. I close all the doors of the van, and release a cloud of bedbug doom into my van. I hurry and close the doors and imagine I can hear their little cries for mercy and see their little faces pressed against the cracks of the doors, desperate for just some fresh air. I laugh. No mercy.
I open the first bag of stuff and scoop up everything from the bag and take it down and toss it in the washer, set it to hot and start it up. I take all the shoes, backpacks, and pillows and throw those in the dryer. I open up the dream duffel, hang up all the costumes, open the makeup kit, and blast it with the remainder of the can of spray. Damn all the whiners for eliminating DDT as an option.
It’s nearly 2am. I’ve already arranged to take time off work to stay home and battle the imagined infestation, but the toddler I’ve missed all weekend is still going to wake up at 5am. So I take my clothes off in the garage again, and head inside and up to bed. Only, I can feel them crawling all over me. I throw off the covers and look. Nothing. I lay back down. My arms itch. I scratch them. I decide to get up and check with a flashlight to see if any of my friends have made it inside. Nope. I finally sleep.
5:30am I’m awakened by fingers in my eyeballs. “Mommy wake up. I miss you.”
It’s JT, my most favorite boy in the whole wide world who I would pay a million dollars to if he’d go away and let me sleep.
My body, realizing that I’m awake, kicks the itchiness into high gear. But it’s my left arm that is itching. Shit. Did I have that bite last night? Was that there yesterday? And for the first time, I feel a little panicky. I look over the whole bed. Nothing. I strip off all my clothes, all the bedding, all the pillows and take it immediately down to the laundry. I wonder if I can get a Napalm drop on my house without the neighboring homes sustaining damage.
I spend the whole entirety of my Monday doing laundry and vacuuming and spraying and crawling around looking at crevices in my home. Do you have any idea how many crevices there are in a home with 3 levels and 3,000 square feet? It is not a small number. I google “where can I buy napalm.” I wonder if the ATF will now be monitoring my online activity. Turns out it’s pretty hard to get one’s hands on napalm. I may just have to go old school with an acetylene torch.