At the beginning of May we discovered a bed bug problem in Sophie's room - NOOOOO!!!! We're not sure when it started or where it came from. Sophie is our girl who isn't afraid of creepy crawlies. She had apparently been finding bugs in her bed for awhile, but had just been moving them to the trash can whenever they showed up. One night she told Dave about it, who told me to wash her bedding in the morning, and as I stripped the sheets I saw we had a big problem.
What an adult bed bug looks like. I hope I never see one again in my life!
It wasn't a major infestation visible bugs everywhere, but I did see a few on the mattress and box spring, and there were a few blood spots on her sheets. I called Dave to report the bad news and him schedule an inspection and then I immediately got to work treating the room as best I could.
Bed bugs are luckily pretty fragile and high temperatures will kill them at any stage of their life cycle. I removed all clothing, bedding, stuffed animals, and her rug to run through the washer and dryer on the highest temperature. All books came out and went through a 200° bake in the oven because they supposedly like to hide in cracks and love paper/cardboard. I removed all the toys from under her bed and closet shelves and rotated them through pots of boiling water. I also had to be careful removing stuff from the room so I wouldn't spread our problem. Every thing was transported in a garbage bag that was then thrown out after one use. Vacuum canisters got emptied directly in the dumpster. I changed my socks every time I entered/exited the room. Then after decontamination was finally complete, everything got boxed or bagged and then put in the attic because it couldn't return to the room. It was an arduous process!!
When the exterminator from Orkin came, she confirmed the problem and checked the entire house. Sophie's room was the source, and we are incredibly lucky it stayed mostly contained. There were signs of eggs in Davey's room and later I did find a bug on his sheets, but the rest of the house was clear. Unfortunately, she quoted us a crazy expensive treatment plan that went as far as coating our attic in boric acid. We thought that sounded a little extreme given that the bugs were only in two rooms, so we found a different company (Truly Nolan) that would spot treat the problem areas for thousands less. We also had to wait 10 days to get treatment. Apparently it was a bad pest season and every company was booked out at least a week.
Our treatment day happened while I was out of town in St. George, which worked out for the best. They spray all the furniture and baseboards in the affected rooms and it made me more comfortable to have our crawling baby out of the house during and after that time. The spray is actually a fungal barrier that infects the bed bugs when crossed, and then they die shortly after. To be effective, however, a person must be using the room. Bed bugs are attracted to CO2 (exhales) and if there is not a food source present, instead of moving around and crossing the barriers, they will go into hiding where they can stay dormant for up to ONE YEAR. Yikes! We didn't tell the kids how the poison worked, so they wouldn't be freaked out when they had to move right back into their rooms after treatment.
Over the next several days I would check around the bed frames and mattress for bugs. Dead bugs were good, and live bugs were ok as long as they were tiny. Because mature bugs were present, there were eggs that still needed to hatch over the next month. When those tiny bugs would emerge and move towards food, they would cross barriers and then die. After about 40 days I was still finding the occasional bug so we called Nolan back to retreat and luckily since that second spray we have seen no activity. Hooray!!
Sophie handled the whole process amazingly well. From bugs in her room, to loosing all her clothes and toys for months, she never cried or got mad. I did find this drawing she made though, of bed bugs parachuting down onto her sleeping self from the jellyfish canopy (which had to be thrown away). Maybe this was a way of processing some lingering emotions about the ordeal.
All the cleaned bedding waiting to get bagged and taken up to the attic. I figured that even if something had survived the laundering process, that a full summer in the intense heat of a Texas attic would finish them off.
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