(This is actually a re-run from 2009, but I'm feeling sentimental.)
My son got his first tick sometime in the past few days; I removed it last night, smothering the poor little bloodsucker (the tick, not my son) in isopropyl alcohol and gently tweezing it out at the head, as directed in the Cat Owner's Home Veterinary Manual (by the way, the cat lives indoors and has never had a tick). Then I placed the little tick corpse in an empty spice jar (curried tick, yum!), filled it with more isopropyl, and handed it to my son.
I hadn't realized the firestorm the first tick would provoke.
"Mom had ticks when she was little," Bennett gloated to Madeleine. (Yes, but I wouldn't call it a badge of honor, and certainly not a highlight of my childhood experiences.)
"Can I play with Bennett's tick?" asked Madeleine (the answer from Bennett was a resounding "No! it's MY tick!")
Of course, being a reasonable parent - and one who completed a nasty four-week course of antibiotics four years ago for suspected Lyme disease (oh, the distinctive target rash, funnily enough, right around my belly button) - I am completely paranoid about the tick. It looks too big for a Lyme-disease carrying deer tick - they are about the size of a pinhead and a different color, and the main common thread among people who get Lyme is that they don't remember having the tick because the darn tick is so miniscule. Of course, as this tick had just eaten and was correspondingly larger, perhaps it was simply a mammoth among deer ticks. And then, there's Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever to worry about. Tuleremia. And ehrlichiosis. I don't even know what ehrlichiosis is, but cattle and dogs get it too.
So the tick sits on the dining table, between the candlesticks, at the bottom of its little bottle of alcohol. More bad tick jokes ensue:
"Is that tick-ila?"
And finally, the best for last, with an optimistic smile:
"Mom, is there a tick fairy?"
No.
