A fun day due to unfortunate circumstances.

When we moved into our second apartment in Stillwater, OK, we knew that it was going to be a tighter fit due to less square footage. But we figured we could tough it out for a year. "You can put up with anything for a year," was our motto. Well, what we didn't expect to have to put up with were bed bugs, carpet beetles, more bed bugs, and fleas.

The bed bugs appeared very shortly after we moved in, so it was clear that they had to have been there when we moved in. They had to treat twice the first time. But I continued to get little bites, or what looked like bites. No one else did, though. Jared caught a bug and we asked our pest guy what it was. It was really little, so he took it to the OSU bug department. It was a carpet beetle larva. And some people are allergic to their hairs and get "bite-like reactions." Just so happened that I was one of them. Lucky, huh? So then they treated for those. We had a few months of respite, and then I started getting bites again. It seemed to be mostly me, though, so I figured it was carpet beetles again. But then we caught another bed bug (the only upside of Allie smearing poop on the wall was being in a position to spot and then catch the bed bug). So we then had two more rounds of treatment for bed bugs.

We have some dear friends who helped us out during the times we had to get out of our apartment for treatment. We mostly went to the Brown's house. On one of those days, they had things they needed to do, but they let us stay at their house and play in their back yard. It was a lot of fun. Here are some pictures from that day.

Allie playing with dirt in a tea pot.

Allie loves swings. And she loves the "baby swing" because it means she can go even higher and swing without hanging on.



Rachel took her turn in the baby swing, too.

Allie also loves the "horsey" swing.

I also mentioned fleas. About four weeks before we moved, two of our neighbors moved with their dogs. The neighbor above us had three dogs, while the one beside us had two. So five dogs moved at the same time. So the fleas needed food, I guess. Unfortunately, they found it in our apartment. We caught more than one. I requested treatment a few times, and we finally got it one week before our move. They showed up without telling me when it was going to be, and expected me to be able to pick up and get out for a few hours. Luckily, they were nice enough to give me 45 minutes to wake up Rachel from her nap and find somewhere to go. And once again, the Brown family took us in. They were truly a blessing for us.

Of course we wanted to make sure we didn't take any bugs of any kind with us when we moved, so we washed all clothes before putting them in boxes that had never been in our apartment and then took them to the Brown's garage. Again, they blessed us by letting us take over a corner of their garage. All the boxes of baby and little girl clothes had to be unpacked, washed, and put in new boxes (bed bugs are small and could hide in the corrugated part). We heat treated things in our car on hot days. We got rid of furniture and other items. It was a crazy process.