Our Personal War of the Worlds

WARNING: THIS BLOG ENTRY IS NOT FOR THE WEAK AT HEART OR FOR THOSE WHO ARE EASILY CREEPED OUT BY BUGS! READ AT YOUR OWN RISK--YOU'VE BEEN WARNED!
I have been putting off this blog post today because I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the insanity and chaos of what actually happened to us last night (Thursday evening)! Today (Friday), when Mike got home he said that several of his co-workers were wondering why I had yet to blog about it. Well, no good reason except that this may be one experience better left alone.
Let me start at the beginning. Last night just as we were finishing our nightly family scripture reading, I looked down and saw this little bug which caused Ariel and I to both scream (for some reason, half way through scriptures Cecily sometimes falls asleep and tonight this was the case or else she would have been screaming too). Then Ariel said there's more and it seemed like all of a sudden hundreds of these flying bugs were flying around us. Upon inspection, Mike realized that they were termites! YIKES! Again leading Ariel and I to freak out. It was so creepy--almost like what you would see in a movie--a B rated movie. All of these bugs flying around with Ariel and I freaking out. My initial thought was the story in the scriptures of one of the ten plagues that the Lord sent to Egypt--the Locust, except ours were in the form of termites (Hey, we has just finished reading the scriptures when it happened).
All I know is it was the creepiest thing ever. I felt like we were being cursed. We were trying to figure out where they were coming from, and as we looked out our back door window we saw what seemed like a million termites swarming our house! NO LYING.
We did start our adventure with prayer, because we definitely needed help from the Lord. Mike was the bravest ever. He wanted to try to keep as many as possible from coming in, so he went out to face the termites one on one with the RAID can. I promise it was like nothing I have ever seen before. Those things were covering him, but he managed to kill a good many of them. Poor Mike, he had to keep asking us to calm down. Easier said than done. Trust me. Ariel finally went into her room and shut the door and fell asleep crying, and I can't blame her. As a side note, I know this is one of the times Mike was questioning why the Lord would give him 3 women to live with--oh the drama.
I was up until 12:30am trying to rid our house of them, and then Mike asked me to go to bed and he would finish up. Sweet man. He did not go to bed until 2am and then he was up and ready for work this morning. When I did go to bed, I kept trying to be positive saying, "This too shall pass, You're blessed., it could be a hurricane etc. I just knew that if I did not try to be positive it would only make the situation worse, and really there ARE a lot worse things in Life, it's just hard to remember that when one is in the moment. I have to say though that I should have just stayed up because, to be honest, I did not get any rest. Every time I shut my eyes, all I could see was swarming termites, or nightmares of those things crawling on me. UGHHH!
I'm not joking when I'm saying that there was tons of them in our house-hundreds, maybe even thousands (okay, maybe not thousands, but definitely hundreds), magically appearing as though from no where. From what we can figure they may have come in through the chimney or a crack by our back door. We did find out today that termites are VERY ATTRACTED TO LIGHT and we had our ceiling fan light on which is VERY BRIGHT and the curtains open (the funny thing is we RARELY ever have that light on). So the lady at Terminex told Mike that they were flying to the light. Now when one usually hears the phrase, "come into the light" it is often referencing death;unfortunately this was not the case of the termites. However, many of them started to lose there wings and so we got out our trusty vacuum and began to vacuum those little suckers up--boy our vacuum got a workout. We had to empty the canister twice. YUCK! Mike was like a hero. He was getting them quick--even killing them with his hands (it still makes me shudder). By vacuum, hands, or being swat at, death did eventually come!
At 7 am this morning, Mike called our termite people, Terminex, and found out that this is the swarming season for termites and apparently there has been a big wave of them across West Mobile. According to the lady at Terminex, last night began their swarming season. Because of this many people have been calling them and they are BOOKED UNTIL WEDNESDAY! WHAT??? But what is one to do?? Luckily the Lord did answer our prayers and we were able to rid our house or them, at least what we can see. So at least the wait won't seem so bad. I'm going to count that as another "tender mercy". Seriously.
Mike called me earlier today from work relating stories of his co-workers and these creepy crawling bugs. I heard a bad story where they struck at a ball park here in Mobile and landing on people causing chaos. Plus, there were several other similar cases like ours. I guess Mike was trying to make me feel better by telling me their stories. But, honestly it didn't help much. I'm a firm believer that bugs ,and most animals, have their place on earth and inside my house is not it!
The Terminex lady did tell us to keep off our lights especially bright ones during the night, because that is what attracts them. So tonight, we are sitting in the dark or reading to the light of the computers. We are taking this serious. And for the first time in a long time, we were all in bed by 9pm. Can I just say one more time: I HATE BUGS!