Friday, June 22, 2007

Horrible Wall Shrimp

Wow, has it really been a month since my last post? I guess I've just been sleeping too well at night and not had time to post (yeah right). Emily is doing pretty well though, she usually goes to sleep at 9:30-10:30PM, wakes up to eat between 1:30-3:30AM, and then I have to get her up when we wake up for the day at 5:30AM. My biggest complaint about the night these days are the wall shrimp! I think they're actually called house centipedes and they're mostly harmless, but I just know that if one ever got on me I would probably die.

The last two nights I have slept in the guest bedroom because Will has been sick and that way he can sleep and not be awakened by Emily grunting over the baby monitor. Also our guest bed kicks ass and I love it! Thanks to Josh and Brad!

Anyway, two nights ago I woke up and in the semi-dark I noticed a diagonal, 3" long blur on the wall. I thought to myself "Brad just painted in here a year ago, there shouldn't be large smudges on the wall, it must be a huge wall shrimp, aaaaaaaaaaaah!" Unfortunately I was right. (As a sidenote, I have the uncanny ability to detect horrible insects with just the slightest of clues...I once discovered a 3" cockroach hiding in our blinds just because I saw what looked like cockroach legs on top of the blinds. Will laughed at me, but he wasn't laughing as he ran to get a rusty knife to get rid of the huge cockroach he found there!)

So I steeled my nerve and smashed the bug, terrified that it would fall into my bed unharmed and exact revenge on me later. It did fall perilously close to the bed, but I smashed it again, and then a third time when I realized with a shudder that the top inch of its body was still sticking out of the wadded up tissue and wiggling at me.

So last night, I was lying in bed, trying to convince myself that I don't see wall shrimp all that often, it was probably a fluke and I wouldn't see one for another year or more, when Emily started squalling so I left the room to go feed her and there was another one on the wall, just as big as the first! I couldn't take the stress of "what if I miss with a tissue, will it fall on my arm and cause me to have to run around screaming?" so I ran to the office to get my purple Old Navy flip flop that has been under the desk for centuries. I knew I had left it there for a reason. With a smack like a gunshot (that Will miraculously slept through) I smacked the hell out of him, but he only left a small smudge on the wall and on my sandal, and none of the usual mess of legs that are usually left behind. I convinced myself that it was enough of a smudge that there had to be something vital in there and he was surely dead, although I hadn't confirmed it with a body. Later though, I found his body lying on the floor half-smashed, and my wonderful husband picked it up and threw it away for me, even though our unspoken wedding vows only included the dispatch of spiders and not specifically wall shrimp <3

I can only conclude that the wall shrimp in my house have decided to grow to monstrous proportions so that they can kill me and carry away my baby. I might have to get Matt over here, because as legend has it, he once lived in a house where all of a sudden millions of wall shrimp came pouring out of a hole in the wall above his bed, and he matter-of-factly covered it with duct tape and went on living his life as normal. I would have moved out in a heartbeat and probably needed to spend some time recovering in a padded cell.

So lets hope that tonight the wall shrimp will stay in their nests and not come out to creep the hell out of me. Or better yet they'll take the murder of two of their oldest and hugest community members as the warning it was intended to be and MOVE THE FECK OUT OF MY HOUSE!

-Sara