Praying Mantis

My New Years update will wait until we can get my pictures onto a computer somewhere, so in the mean time, let's go back a week or so...


Ryan and I tend to have moments like this. Remember how our first married vacation that turned into one of THOSE vacations? Well our first Christmas may be the same!! Luckily this did not happen on Christmas, but it will revolve around our first tree and will always be remembered as part of our first Christmas.

We argued a bit about how long to leave the tree up. In my family we always left it up until the Feast of the Epiphany, or January 6th. Ryan's thought it was bad luckto leave it up past New Years. I was winning out, we went up to NJ for Christmas and were about to do the same for New Years. Getting all the ornaments away was going to take a lot of time so it looked like it was going to stay up til we got back from new Jersey. On Wednesday night, December 29th, we were in the living room and I glanced up at ceiling and saw something up there.


sorry not my picture

What is it you ask? A baby praying mantis. Now I always heard you were not supposed to kill them. As a kid you were told it was against the law in Jersey even! Not sure if that is true.... *googles* Ok it's not. Anyway....

We caught the first one and set it outside like nice karma abiding people. Or whatever. We get back in and notice another one. And another. And two more over there. Ryan suggests they may have been coming from our Christmas tree. We look by the tree and five more are on the wall. Ugh. Bugs don't bother me usually, but this was kind of grossing me out. So I set my husband on getting all of them and told him since he was off tomorrow and I had to work he could take down the tree if he wanted to. That way he gets his way and it is down before New Years. I even said if he just gently took all the ornaments off the tree I'd put them away when I got home.

Deal.

The next day I am at work and it is D.E.A.D. I am googling and reading blogs and playing words with friends or scrabble on my itouch when I hear from Ryan. Apparently he went to take off the ornaments and when he looked inside the tree it was swarming with hundreds of baby praying mantises manti mantises! He looked up at the star and saw even more of them congregating.

ACK!

So my calm husband (thank god I was at work) quickly removes all the ornaments except for the lights and the silver strand of ball things we had on the tree. He then dragged it stand and all to the front door, quickly undid the stand, and ran out of the apartment and outside and threw our tree down in the bushes. He then shook all the praying mantises off him and whipped off his jacket and started beating it against the railing.

ACKx2!

He then carefully stands up the tree and begins to spin off the lights and other stringed decorations. Bugs were aflyin! He then dragged the tree to the dumpster and headed over to the leasing office. They got the exterminator to come and respray out baseboards (free of charge!).

The exterminator was shocked though.

E: Why would you want to kill praying mantises? They eat other bugs!
Ryan: Yes but we had hundreds of them in our apartment.
E: Yea well they eat each other anyway. If you left for a week you'd only have one big one left!
Ryan: That's nice, but we still want to make sure none get out and into other apartments.
E: I sometimes will catch them and put them in my garden even.
Ryan: Yes, but you don't put them in your living room. Please spray.

Oy.

I am not going to lie, when Ryan told me the story I was laughing. Very grateful I was not home, but laughing. I can just imagine my big strong Marine jumping up and down to shake off the little things and frantically beating his jacket and it made me laugh. When I got home I put all the ornaments away and we still found about five more.

But we got in the car and drove to Jersey regardless. Me shuddering randomly every now and then when I thought about it.

When we got home Sunday night we found one dead one hanging out on the ceiling and Ryan said there was one in the bathroom... but no sightings since then. We suspect our Christmas tree had eggs on it and our apartment is quite warm so they thought Hey it's spring! Let's hatch! I told Ryan next year, we are getting a fake tree. He told me we're just going to go somewhere next year that sprays their trees.

Let's see what happens eh?

*shudder*