All God's creatures

The list of bugs that I can tolerate is very short. I do understand that there are some bugs out there that have some purpose in this world and I'm fine with that. The moment they step one of their creepy little legs in my house though, all bets are off and I will squish or flush their buggy asses faster than you can say RAID.

The only bug that gets a pardon is the ladybug, they get a one way ticket outside instead of the business side of my shoe.

Regardless of any good qualities they may have, I hate them all; spiders, wasps, cockroaches and weird-ass beetles that I have to google just to figure out what they are.

But the bugs that win the award for "biggest jerks" are mosquitoes and ticks. Politicians too, for that matter. I cannot abide by something that lives off the lifeblood of another and offers nothing in return.

My daughter, however, loves all these nasties and more. If I am going to dispose of a creepy-crawly unfortunate enough to be found crawling inside my house, I usually have to pretend to put it outside first before I dispatch it into a watery grave. I don't return it to the wild lest it crawl right back inside.

Why the charade? Because my daughter has an extremely sweet and soft heart. She loves these bugs as if they were her friends, or worse; her own offspring. I don't want her to think her mother is a horrible person... she'll decide that soon enough when she is a teenager.

Remember this post? When she was befriending the flies that had gotten inside our house to the point of giving them names? And then she would plead with me to not kill "Sally"? Well, it happened again, this time with a significantly more vile creature.

We brought the kids home from playing in the backyard of a friend's house the other night. As I was taking Elise upstairs for her bath, she complained that "something was crawling on her", then she shrieked and batted at her cheek. The offending bug was thrown to the ground.

I took a look and my blood ran cold. I scooped it up in a baby food jar for a closer look and my fears were confirmed... it was a TICK.

Of all the nastiness on this earth, I don't think I hate anything as much as I hate the tick. I had a run-in with them before that still makes me shudder. I kept it in the jar so I could google it's ass and spent the rest of the night certain that our house was now infested with them.

The next morning I come downstairs to find Elise holding the jar and talking to her new friend, "Tina". She wanted to keep her new friend and "feed her and give her water". Ha... fat chance.

Now granted, she does not know how awful ticks are because I chose not to disclose their modus operandi. And thankfully, the tick never bit her.

But this befriending of the nasties has got to stop lest we end up run out of the neighbourhood for having some freak show menagerie.

"Tina"