I do not recommend starting work after maternity leave and discovering that your cat has fleas in the same week. It makes for a lot of laundry, an angry set of parents, a very wet and upset cat, and a little girl who didn't get much attention last weekend. My first full week back to work was made extremely stressful by said fleas. It didn't help that we didn't discover the fleas until about 5pm on Saturday...too late to get some flea medicine from a vet. Instead Dan went to the local pet store and came back with some shampoo, a food additive, and a sheet of information. The shampoo would "sorta work" according to the clerk; she swore by the food additive, saying that in three weeks our cat would taste really bad to the fleas and they would leave her alone. Which is great, but we needed to get rid of the fleas immediately. I hate bugs. Especially the kind that can bite me and cause horrible allergic reactions. Like fleas.
So we dutifully shampooed the cat. Twice. The directions said that the cat must be lathered for 5 to 15 minutes in order to kill the fleas. So we thought it had been five minutes....Sierra certainly thought it had been because she tore up my arm trying to get out of the tub. There were no fleas in the water so we thought maybe the infestation was not so bad. We started to towel her off and noticed that the fleas were still crawling through her fur. So we clipped her claws and Dan got suited up for cat holding duties. This involved wearing some ski gloves and gaiters to cover his arms. We then rebathed the cat and spent another 30 minutes pulling fleas off of her and drowning them. The poor cat looked so miserable and I started to cry about the whole thing. We then had to clean up the bathroom and find some sheets so that we could go to sleep that night. Earlier we had hauled every piece of soft furnishing into the basement to be washed in hot water. Twice. All this while the baby girl slept on the other side of the bathroom wall. It is a miracle that she didn't wake up.
We finally got some flea medicine the next day, after doing a lot of reading about how if you want to get rid of fleas you have to use some medicine because while the food additive is nice, it is not going to eradicate the fleas. Apparently the little devils have been laying eggs all around the house, wherever Sierra likes to spend some time. So we have to treat the house too in order to get rid of the fleas. And oh by the way, anything you do will take at least 3 to 6 weeks to work given the life cycle of the flea. Great. More laundry.
So now, after vacuuming the apartment three times, throwing away the bag each time, debating the merits of flea spray versus flea powder, talking to two vet assistants about how to best rid ourselves of fleas, calling the poison control center about the hazards of flea powder in the carpet, more reading of webpages about the life cycle of the flea and all the horrible diseases they carry, searching Julia from head to toe looking for bites (two found so far), 50 bites covering my legs and stomach, getting Benadryl cream in the middle of the night to keep the bites from driving me crazy, and keeping the cat in semi-quarantine in the bathroom, we still have fleas. I didn't get any new bites today, but I will most likely have at least one more before I wake up in the morning. Oh, and we have lots of laundry to do.
Things that did go well in the last two weeks:
1) Julia's adaptation to daycare...on Friday she took 11.5 oz from 4 bottles during the day!
2) My biking to and from work from the Hutch...only takes 20 minutes and it makes me feel really good.
3) Visited with Dan's Aunt Barbara and Uncle Don from DC and had a nice time with them.
4) Got rid of the "mushy brain" feeling after three days at work and actually did an experiment.
5) Dan's paper was accepted into Science
6) Finished a sweater for Julia and promptly started another as well as a lace scarf for my mom.
7) Julia remaining a pretty good sport as she suffers through her first cold.
Things that did not go so well:
1) the fleas
2) biking through creosote smoke to get to work after a huge dock fire on Lake Union
3) Julia getting a very stuffy nose and bad sounding cough that is either a cold or a nascent ear infection.
4) the fleas and the immense load of laundry they create...we had to throw away our two best feather pillows.
Anyway, here's to a better week ahead (birthday and massage on Sunday!!!) and fewer fleas.
