…we have an unnatural fascination with woodticks.
Apparently they are gross or creepy or give people the heeby jeebies. At a homeschool park day recently, another mom told me having one stuck to her actually made her queasy. Another mom told me not too long ago that she had saved every woodtick the kids ever had and brought it to the doctor’s office for testing…in case the kids developed lymes disease. (Lymes, by the way, is carried by some – not all - deer ticks. Not woodticks.)
My family and I are certainly strange. I personally think the danger/gross factor of woodticks is highly overrated. Woodticks have provided us with many hours of learning. We have experimented with the best way to kill a tick…we have done everything from sticking them in the freezer to letting them swim in honey. Or ketchup. Every time we find a tick, either on us or one of the five dogs who live here, its an opportunity to learn. Humane? I don’t know. But quite a learning experience. Woodticks are tough. Kind of indestructible. And seeing how every mama lays about 2,000 eggs, I think with 13 acres of woods, we’re well supplied.
Woodticks are also fast. One day we pulled six woodticks off one of the dogs. It was then suggested that we have woodtick races. So we got out a piece of tagboard, drew a big circle on it, set the ticks in the middle, and watched to see which tick made it out of the circle first.
Genuinely good fun. And probably a little (or a lot) redneck.
So now you know. Our Freaky Friday contribution is we hang out with woodticks.
How is your family freaky?
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3 comments:
We used to be tick phobic, until we moved to 16 acres in the country that is wooded. Now pulling ticks off of us is a daily occurrence in the spring-fall months. We are sure to have a tick-check every night before bed, and it has become a routine. We've become a little ATTACHED to ticks (no pun intended).
I'll admit to being a little tick-squeamish. It's not the plain old ones we get crawling on us that bug me, it's the thought of pulling one that is 100x it's original size off the dogs. Ugh! I;m sure there is something freaky about us....we seem to find the educational merit, and coolness factor in most things...
Those insanely huge ones are a bit much, aren't they? We check the dogs several times a day, but every so often we miss one on the dogs, and they get so fat they evetually just fall off in some random place...almost always when they are in the house it seems. Then you've got some alien looking giant mushroomy thing crawling around on the floor. Its amazing those little legs can still move when their body gets a billion times bigger than it started out!
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