My name is Sister P and I survived...

...I survived a bed bug invasion.

I am FOREVER changed by having had bed bugs. I'm getting itchy just typing about them and looking at the picture below LOL.


Most people are ashamed about having them. I'm not! I didn't breed them, they hitch hiked into my house like they do anyone else who had them.

Your housekeeping skills don't normally make you catch them, but your lack of cleanliness can make them linger and take up residence.The shame associated with them is what, I believe, causes people to spread them unknowingly.I'm going to publish this series about how we discovered them, fought them and have been bug free for 6 months.

The discovery:

I remember it like yesterday. It was in September as the days begin to get cooler in Kentucky. It was sunny, but not too hot.

One day I smooshed a tiny red/pink bug on my husbands back while we were waking up for the day. When I say tiny, I mean it was like a grain of raw sugar small. But when I touched it, it was just bloody. I thought that was strange, I'd never seen a bug that small filled with blood like that. But I went on with my day.

The next day I came home to find my husband had the mattress off the bed and was peeling the lining off the bed frame and inspecting it with a flashlight and tweezers.

He said that something bit him and he caught it, put it in a glass and looked it up online.

And that's how we found out we had bed bugs.

You can Google bed bugs and see pics of them. After reading up on them I realized that we had ignored some warning signs.

Our neglected signs:
I had itchy bites on my legs that I thought were mosquito bites from gardening near the creek behind my home. Bed bugs don't bite once, they bite you in a cluster or a row.

The bites aren't just itchy, they're a bit painful and the spots are tender.

My husband had bites on his forearms, but he was also battling a poison sumac reaction so we missed the bed bug bites.

Then, the baby bug I ignored above.

Luckily, my daughter had no signs of being bitten.

The lessons:

Don't get ''used to" bugs and itchy bites in the summer. Don't just kill a bug and say, "Oh its a bug. Bugs are everywhere." Lucky for me, my husband is this inquisitive "there's an answer for everything'' kind of guy and looked them up.

Because we live in Kentucky with a creek behind our house and have 7 garden plots outdoors, we're exposed to a lot. So we just look at bugs as a part of country living, but not anymore. I'm looking up EVERYTHING now.

I believe that because we caught them early, we were able to conquer them fast. Within two weeks, we didn't see anymore signs and only had two more bug sightings after that (which is another story that I'll get to), and have been symptom free for 6 months.

Next: Alerting people who had been in my home...and where the bugs came from.