The House of Sand and Foggers

We have a sandbox in our backyard. It is basically a little slice of Isaac nirvana. Everyday he asks, "Mom, can we go play in the sandbox? Please?" Usually I comply, but we never stay out too long because I can only stand on high-alert over Jakey for so long as he attempts to shove fistful after fistful of sand into his gaping baby maw. The box is small, but they can both play in it, dive in it a little, roll around in it, and wrestle all kinds of sand into their pockets, socks, and diapers to bring inside with them and deposit in all kinds of obnoxious places.

Maybe it's the toys I'm trying to herd back into our sunroom or the big fat baby screaming from my hip, but on more than one occasion I have neglected to put the lid back on the sandbox before returning inside. Because I can't remember to do anything, ever, a few times I've even left the sandbox uncovered for several days in a row. One morning while making coffee, Dada peeked out the kitchen window to see a friendly neighborhood cat taking a big dump in our open sandbox. I got a lecture from him then, but I sifted out the poop and considered it over with, from then on making it a point of replacing the lid religiously.

A few days later I started to notice maybe 5 or 6 small red spots on the Jakester. I was a little worried he was coming down with chicken pox or something, since he hasn't had that shot yet, but they didn't really look like the pox-spots Dr. Google showed me. The next day I saw a few spots on Isaac. I didn't think much of them at the time. There are lots of mosquitoes and other flying annoyances that like to attack us at the sandbox, so I chalked the spots up to that. We stayed away from the sandbox for a few days, but inevitably there was begging from Isaac and conceding from the mommy and we returned. More red spots came and went, but never so many that I was really concerned. They were just getting bitten by bugs, I thought, not much I can do about that.

Around the same time, Cat-brother started freaking out. He is usually noisy and obnoxious, but he took his noise and obnoxiousness to a new level, howling as if in mortal pain or peril several times during the day. I checked his food and water all the time and everything was just fine. He himself appeared perfectly okay, aside from the enormous number of hairballs he was coughing up. I thought perhaps I'd forgotten to give him his special-kitty anti-hairball food, but no.

Cat-brother has been an indoor cat all his life, so you have to forgive my ignorance. It wasn't until I actually saw a flea crawling through Isaac's scalp in the bathtub that I put two and two together.

Last Monday we bought Cat-brother a flea collar; Wednesday we ditched the collar and bought anti-flea drops for the back of his neck. He was visibly grateful. We were not. Now that their cat-house was poisoned, the fleas decided they should jump all over my little boys. We read up on flea control online and decided we would be cheap and just vacuum more, which was really quite laughable given the nearly complete lack of vacuuming that was going on before the fleas set in. I asked Dada to help me vacuum more. Really, I can't vacuum the whole house by myself. Jacob won't be happy in his crib that long and Isaac will be into things he should not if I am not watching him. But we forgot in the evenings, and Dada had an awful, hard week and would fall asleep on the couch too early to get anything done around the house.

The last straw for me came on Friday morning as we accompanied Dada to the doctor. Sitting in the waiting room, I saw a flea on Isaac's neck. 10 minutes later, I saw a flea on Jacob's neck. Seeing that we were potentially taking our flea infestation with us around town, I flipped.

Dada took Friday afternoon off work and bought four canisters at a pet store to fog the house. It took 2-1/2 hours to pack up the food and essential items (including Cat-brother) and barricade them in the garage, sealing it off with duct tape. I started to pack up the boys' toys to avoid a hellacious cleaning effort later, but I stopped when I was a few toys into Isaac's first toybox and was getting eaten alive by fleas. Apparently Cat-brother had been roosting in the basement underneath Isaac's heat register and the fleas had made a haven for themselves in Isaac's toyboxes, feasting on little boy flesh as it suited them.

Don't you so want to come over to my house now?

We had to leave the premises for 2 hours while the poison cloud floated around the house, then come back, open a window, and stay away for yet another hour. After a leisurely stint at the mall and then a purposeful stint at BJs, our poison had worked its bug-killing magic and we came back to a house to find a messy-person's nightmare, where every surface, article of clothing, sheet, towel, toy, dish, etc etc had to be thoroughly washed. But within a day, we started finding more fleas than we had ever before, and they were all either dead or doing sickly-looking things like trying to walk while lying on their sides. The poison doesn't claim to kill the adult fleas outright, but rather prevents eggs from hatching and baby fleas from laying eggs, so we'll likely continue to be bitten until the adults die. But it's two days later and the boys have only had two new bites between them today, whereas yesterday, they each had 4 or 5. And, two days later, we are also still doing laundry and dishes.

This has possibly been the worst weekend I have had since becoming a parent. I would not wish a flea infestation on anybody, ever. It was just disgusting to realize that my babies were getting bitten, and it is worse to have to worry that every surface my crawling, orally fixated baby touches is covered in flea poison. But it is all the worse because I feel it is entirely my fault that we are in this situation. I left the sandbox uncovered and, perhaps more importantly, I keep the messiest house in the universe, one ideal for flea-breeding. I have no idea what we are going to do with the sandbox, aside from dumping the sand. But I now realize that my inability, no, refusal to keep a clean house is detrimental to my family and must stop.

Because Dada loves me so, he gave me what is possibly the greatest Christmas present in the world for a messy person like me, one who is disgusted by her lackluster efforts as a housekeeper and yet feels like a horrible mother if she didn't spend 50 gazillion hours a day playing with her boys. Dada got me a Roomba.

Without further adieu, meet our new robot child, Sonny. Straight out the box, Sonny cleaned the floors of the living room, the kitchen, the dining room (including Jakey's dinner mess, a feat in and of itself), and part of Isaac's room before he ran out of energy and needed to nap in his charger. On a full charge, Sonny can run for three hours. Sonny at first looks a little drunk and/or confused, but he is actually running routines to clean in a modified spiral pattern while assessing the size and shape of the room. As you might imagine, Sonny is also highly entertaining to toddlers and babies.