Rhymes with ICK

Although the calendar swears there's another few weeks of spring, the weather agrees with Memorial Day. For all intents and purposes, it is summer. It is safe to pull out your white shoes and handbags, trade in the red for the white wine, and if you live in the Raleigh, North Carolina area, heed the warnings for DANGEROUS HEAT in this week's forecast. I'm not exactly sure what that entails, but I think I'll leave the hair straightener in the drawer until the mercury settles back to a comfortable 91.

Oh but did we have a spring. It was my first as a North Carolinian, and if they're all like this, I'm a-stayin'. The days were comfortable, with a gentle sun and an easy breeze; the evenings were what my father used to call "perfect sleeping weather", the kind of nights for which screens were invented. We entertained one day over the holiday weekend and spent something like eight hours on our screen porch. Fabulous.

Our home sits on the edge of a lush, forested area that provides a beautiful backdrop for enjoying a morning coffee, an afternoon tea, or an evening cocktail. It is home to musical birds of a wide variety, feisty squirrels and a family of deer. It's idyllic.

But pleasure has its price. And what's worse, it adds to my Mommy-load.

After seven years of the nightly BATH, BOOKS, and BED routine, I now add a step to our evening parent-child ritual. BUG CHECKS. The woods, it seems, has ticks. Lots of ticks. Ticks that drop on you from branches when you chase a stray ball. Ticks that find comfort in the soft underside of a toddler's arm pit. Ticks that may or may not carry with them Lyme disease and something called Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, which I find particularly ironic, as I have just moved FROM the Rocky Mountain region.

My checks are thorough. In addition to arm pits, I check leg pits (a term creatively coined by my then 6-year-old son). I look behind ears, comb hair in new and interesting parts, and investigate areas so dark, I may have qualified as a proctologist in some states. This is what we do, we mothers in the year 2008, mothers who are well informed enough to be frightened.

I discovered ticks innocently enough one evening last summer. I thought my daughter had a tiny clump of mud on the underside of her arm. I plucked it off, and noticing a stronger pull than a little piece of dirt should offer, I examined it closely. It wiggled. I gagged. Its little crustacean shape made me regret my childhood crabbing expeditions on the Jersey shore. Were all the soft shells I've consumed over the years getting their revenge in some bizarro-twist of crab-like reincarnation? I pondered for just a moment, and then flushed the little bugger down the toilet.

I've done the Internet searching and read enough articles in the local paper to know to apply Vaseline to smother the miniscule monster rather than yank on it too hard and break off its head into the afflicted area. I try to act early, and often, but still I find myself putting my hand to my kids' foreheads, fearing any and all signs of infection.

Must go. I can hear the bath water stop. Time to get the tweezers, and get busy.