Pet Tick

I'm not a real sqeamish female. No, I'm not the type who screams at the sight of a bug and I've been known to squash my own spiders. However, I am kind of creeped out by ticks. I think because they bite you, burrow into your skin, and then may possibly give you a horrible illness, like Lyme's disease. The whole idea that one might be on you at this very moment sucking your blood and you haven't found it yet just gives me the shivers.

Unfortunately for me ticks are rampant in this part of the country. In fact it's the tick I have to thank for my husband's job even. He's here studying tick-born viruses (meaning diseases you get from tick bites). Specifically I think he's looking at a tick-born encephalitis (oh, look it up!). His entire workplace actually is funded on the backs of ticks since it was originally built to study Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, which you get from, yep, ticks! So, all this to say that the ticks are everywhere here! Everytime you go anywhere mildly outdoorsy you have to do a thorough check afterwards for ticks. (Picture us all yelling "Tick check!" after getting home from an outing and sorting through each other's hair like monkeys at the zoo.)

Much to my creeped-outness we have found several on or around us after playing in the great outdoors. The most recent was after a hike last weekend Trav found one crawling in Bree's hair! (The head is one of their favorite places to attach themselves) Uggh! Travis says they take their time to bite you but in my mind the thing was just minutes away from biting her and who knows what it might have given her. Filthy little disease bugs!

Anyways, so every time Trav finds one he kills it by putting it in some rubbing alchohal in a test tube. Then he looks at it and stuff to see what kind it is etc. Brianna finds this fascinating and this last time was insisting on holding the tube with the dead, floating tick inside it all around the house. She apparently does not share my phobia of ticks. (Although we did go through a very short phase of about two weeks awhile back where she was terrified of all buggies and would scream bloody, bloody, murder if she saw so much as a gnat.) She was talking to the tick and when we got ready to head out to run some errands she even asked if the tick could come with us!

Now, I consider myself a pretty laid back woman when it comes to this kind of stuff. I mean, I don't cry when I break a nail, my husband collects dead insects, I like to go fishing, etc. But I draw the line at having a pet tick!