...don't let the bed bugs bite!

Unfortunately, Darren and I unknowingly did just that. Shortly after we moved in Darren started getting crazy itchy bug bite looking welts during the night. We never saw anything in our room, and I wasn't getting them, so we just figured it was an allergy or something and that it would go away. Well, that didn't really happen. About a month ago I started getting them too, right about the time things warmed up and I started sleeping in shorts and a t-shirt instead of sweats. We still couldn't find anything, so we just dealt with it by buying stock in anti-itch cream.

Well, last Sunday Darren woke up about 1am with a new bite that itched like mad. He got up to go put stuff on it and in the process saw that a little friend had joined us in bed. I know, gross. He killed it and we went back to sleep, confident we had caught our little critter. Well, the next day there was one on the lamp shade next to my side of the bed. I got a good look at it this time and googled it right after I got home from dropping Darren off at school. It didn't take long to find out that we had "bed bugs". Who knew there actually was such a thing?! They "feed" during the night and then hide in the cracks and seams of your box spring or carpet during the day. I was utterly grossed out and immediatly went down to our complex office and told them we had a bug problem. Our manager was out for the day, so the lady in the office didn't really know what to do, so Darren and I decided to avoid the problem for the night and began our three night camp out on our living room floor. The next day our manager came by and told us their pest control company would come by Thursday to spray/bomb for them, but we had a list of 16 different things that had to be done before.

We got to work on all the laundry that had to be done on Tuesday, and then spent Wednesday vacuuming, bagging and covering everything we had in our apartment.

Darren hard at work

Our bedroom

Our linen closet packed with stuff and covered in plastic

  Our living room

Our kitchen

It has been a pretty rough week trying to get everything ready, but we were happy when Thursday finally came...and even more when the pest man finally showed up. We got up early on Thursday to get everything ready to go before 9am (he was supposed to come between 9 and 6. Like waiting for paint to dry). We had to be out of the apartment for 4-6 hours once he got there, so we packed everything up about 8:30 and waited. And waited, and waited, and waited. He finally showed up about 12:30, so we headed out. We knew we had a ton of time so we headed over to the temple to do a session. We ended up doing sealings, and it was such a great experience.

We were done there by 2:30, so we went over to the laundromat and got the rest of our pillows and blankets washed. We still had a little bit of time so we drove around downtown Mesa and then headed home to unpack everything. Turns out moving into an apartment twice is no fun. We got just about everything done pretty quickly though and then crashed for the night.

We woke up biteless this morning, so now we're just crossing our fingers this lasts for the next 5 weeks until we move out!