Fly, fly AWAY!!!

If you're a bit squeamish, you may want to stop reading at this point. What you are about to read is a true story that happened to us within a few days of being back from vacation. If you're still reading, consider yourself warned. This is pretty disgusting!

Bursting through the door at the end of a 10 hour drive felt just as you'd imagine.....wonderful! The house felt cool and it was so nice to be home, back to our own house and sleeping in our own beds again. We returned home on Saturday and spent Sunday just being lazy. Jeremy was on his last day of vacation and so was I. This meant that no matter how filthy the kitchen got, no matter how much milk we needed for breakfast in the morning, no matter how many pairs of flip flops I had to step over to get from the media room to the kitchen, I was not cleaning, going to the store, or picking up anything around the house. This meant free reign for the kids. By Monday morning, our clean house definitely looked lived-in. Without my constant reminders (gentle and sometimes not so gentle) my kids, namely Vanessa, Sabrina, and Mr.P, can tear through this house with the relentless fury of an F5 tornado. There was definitely work to be done by the time I woke on Monday morning.

Luckily, I was still buzzing from my vacation high when I got to work on Monday morning. There was lots of laundry to be done because my sweet husband mixed the dirty clothes that we had acquired the last couple of days in Topeka with the clean clothes that my mom had generously laundered for us mid-trip. He knows I'm always looking for more laundry to do. Isn't he wonderful?! So giving. (That's called sarcasm. I offer it daily as a free service.) There were dishes to be done, lots of dishes. Why use one cup twice in the same day? That's my kids' philosophy. Anyway, you get the picture. It was clean up time and I was on it.

As I glanced in the pantry, the full boxes on the floor reminded me that Tuesday is recycle day and I better get our recycled goods out to the curb. I picked up both boxes, one for paper and the other for cardboard, and noticed these small brown pellet-looking things on the floor. Hmmm....interesting. Someone maybe dropped some brown rice? No, these were too big for them to be rice. They actually looked like rolly pollies (sp) if rolly pollies didn't have legs so that they were completely round and just as long, except these were brown. They even had the little lines on them that rolly pollies have. (I posted a picture. If you'd like to see it bigger, just click on it.) Weird. Out comes the vaccuum, but first Jeremy is called upon to investigate. "Oh, there were some of those in the washer yesterday when I did a load of laundry. If you squeeze them they pop," he says nonchalantly as he's showing me with a paper towel. Sick! But okay, if you're not worried then I'm not worried either. Whoosh!! Up the vaccuum they go. As I'm vaccuuming all of the downstairs floors, I did notice a couple more here and there, but didn't think anything about them except that it was still kind of weird. By Monday night, the house was tidy and off to bed we went. If only we had known what was lurking in the dark.

Sometime on Tuesday morning Sabrina and Mr.P called me to the kitchen. I hadn't been downstairs yet and was dragging my feet a bit to get down there. "Hurry Mommy! You have to see this!!" So eventually I make it to the kitchen and find them pointing to Bentley's food dish. Buzzing all around the edge of the dish were what looked like 20 or 30 flies. What the heck?!! I know for a fact that no door had been left open. There hadn't been a beep all morning. Bentley wasn't even in the house yet. At this point I hadn't made the connection of those brown things from earlier. I grabbed a flyswatter and we began to count. By the time we got done with the flies on the dish, more were noticed around the windows in the living room. By the time we got done with the living room windows, more were noticed in the kitchen windows. By the time we got done with the kitchen windows, more were noticed in the dining room windows. When we thought we had killed them all, I called Jeremy to let him know. I needed someone to share my disgust. By the time we went to bed, there were maybe 1 or 2 that had escaped death, but I vowed I would get them in the morning. What a nightmare day that was, but alas, it wasn't over.

On Wednesday morning we all slept in. Mr.P woke me up just in time to receive a text from a friend who I had planned to meet at the pool. I had half an hour, so I jumped in the shower and then Mr.P and I shimmied into our bathing suits and took off for the pool. By the time I got home, the rest of the kids were awake and I was ready to clean up the fly mess from the previous day. I wanted to mop the floors because even though we couldn't see the stains left from a million fly carcasses, I knew they were there. Gross. First, I checked the windows. NOOOOO!!!! More flies!! This time I was pulling out the big guns. I called Jeremy to find out where the bug spray was. I oversprayed every window in the kitchen, family and dining rooms and watched while the flies dropped. Mr.P and Sabrina were a little more humane. They each swatted to their hearts content since the flies were now moving slow enough for them to get a good aim. I, on the other hand, was content to watch them writhe around and suffer in prolonged agony until they were relieved by the cold hand of death. Yeah, I'm still a little bitter.

By the end of this disgusting ordeal, just over 200 flies had met their maker in our lovely home, now tarnished by the memory of the Great Fly Invasion 2010. Since then, every nook and cranny of this house, every little thing that can hold still has been suctioned, washed, cleaned, and dusted off. And we still have no idea how it all got started.