{the nightmare on akule street}

I finally decided to re-write the story behind the almost four weeks without posts. Let's hope it gets published this time!

Mid-November we finally moved to the North Shore. My husband has always bugged me wanted to move back to the "country", but since we got married (almost 5 years ago) it has been more practical to live in the city (our church, my work, our university, etc were all in Honolulu, plus the fact that I loved being in the city and that I never surf on the North Shore and rather surf "town").

When I got pregnant and decided I would stop working and put my BFA on hold once Lukka arrived, my husband seized the chance! By that time he was already working full-time up at the North Shore and had to face the infamous Oahu traffic everyday. At that point in our lives the cards changed, and now it made more sense moving up there.

Lukka was 2 months old when we finally found an apartment that fit our needs and price range(and if you don't live in Hawaii you will never know how expensive renting and buying is). My parents, my sister, and my brother and his wife were all here (all the way from Brazil) to meet Lukka, so they helped with the move.

Everything was in place, and a few weeks later my sister started getting weird bites while she slept. Then my other sister, then me, then my dad. I went to the doctor after a really bad allergic reaction, and they said it was mosquitoes. But we never saw them.

I started suspecting it was some sort of crawling bugs, and one day my dad finally saw one. I looked at it and knew it was a bed bug! We called an extermination company and they confirmed it.

If you never had bed bugs, pray you will never have to experience something like this. If you had them, you know it is hell. They bite when you're sleeping, or laying down, so you never see them. They're called "bed" bugs, but they can live in any crack, screw holes, seems, carpets, the list goes on. The bites REALLY itch! A whole week later and it'll still be itching. If you have allergic reaction to mosquitoes, then it's even worse!

OK, enough talking about these hellish bugs. yuck. I never want to think about them again.

Long, long, long story short: we had to throw away our mattress, our bed, our sofa, our dining table!! and rip out the half carpet in the living room. We had to remove ALL of our stuff (that we had just moved in) and take it to a vault to be gassed. Our apartment needed to be empty so it could be treated twice, with a two week gap between treatments. And my family was no longer here, so my husband did most of the packing-everything-in-plastic-bags and moving-out on his own (we didn't want to ask our friends for help because of the risk of bed bugs getting on them).

So we were camping in our own house for two weeks, and we had to leave for both weekends because of the treatment.

I thank God because Lukka's room was the only place where the bugs didn't go. So we didn't have to throw his things away, just treat them, then wash/clean everything a hundred times - just to be sure!

And I had to soak all of his diapers in bac-out various times, then wash on hot another hundred times (high heat kills the bugs and eggs) because I couldn't dry the pocket diapers, covers, wet bags on the high heat dryer, or else the water proof fabric (PUL or TPU) would be damaged - again, just to be sure! I didn't want to take any chances with the bugs!

We're still recovering from the nightmare. The apartment is still packed with black plastic bags that we are slowly taking apart and inspecting and cleaning. But we finally managed to buy a sofa, and a mattress. The actual bed will come later.

It's been three weeks and I am overjoyed to say there have been ZERO bites or bugs.

Aloha,
Sophia

posted from a bug free home!