AAAAAAAACCCCKKKKKK!!!!!!

Sorry. That was just me screaming because while getting my baby in the bathtub tonight I discovered an itty-bitty tiny TICK on his chest.

As any good Camp Fire girl who has ever been to camp knows, the tiny ones are the worst, the most likely to carry Lyme disease. Living out in the country we find ticks everywhere - just the other day I picked one off the cat that was nearly the size of a blueberry, it was so overgorged. But those are big ticks. This one was tiny, almost the size of the period at the end of this sentence.

And it was EMBEDDED in MY BABY. (Ok, he's four years old, but he's my baby.) I have no mercy for anything that even thinks of threatening my kids, and this thing had chewed its way into my precious baby's chest and was sucking away on him. I wasn't just going to kill this tick, I was going to make it wish it and it's entire ancestral line had never been created by God.

The main roadblock was that I COULD NOT FIND TWEEZERS. Anywhere. Not in the bathroom. Not in the first aid buckets. Not in the hall closet. Not in the junk drawer.

I would have sold my soul for tweezers at that moment. Luckily I did manage to find some while maniacally dumping out the entire contents of the Caboodle I keep stashed full of random crap under the bathroom sink (yes, I am a child of the 80's and I still have it - what's your problem?). Gold ones, nonetheless. Though I did stop for just the smallest fraction of a nanosecond to wonder why anyone ever thought tweezers needed to appear gold-plated (and I have no idea whatsoever where they came from, along with most of the rest of the stuff in that Caboodle), I firmly clamped down on the blood-sucker and pulled it out, mouthparts and all. The baby and I examined it waving its legs and chewing mandibles in mid-air, and then I laid it on a lovely harsh cold pallet of drenched alcohol pads while I cleaned my baby's bite and deposited him in the warm bath.

Then I made waterboarding and SERE training look like Club Med. When it was finally over, Mr Tick lay lifeless between two more drenched alcohol pads inside the suffocating confines of a sealed baggie, where he's going to stay for at least two weeks until I can be certain that my baby will not suffer any effects of the bite.

I may even hang him up on the back porch as an example for all his family and friends to see.

I am Mama Bear, hear me roar: Don't mess with my kids. Nothing will stop me from destroying any semblance of life you have left.