Xavier's First Tick
Greetings to everyone.
We awoke late in the morning today. Xavier got to bed late, and did not want to sleep in his plush pack-n-play. He stood in it, crying with some panic near the end. We supposed he felt alone and abandoned in the cabin, even though we were right outside the room. This was all strange to him.
I went in with a bottle and let him lay with me. He went to sleep shortly after, but in our not nearly Queen sized bed, not in his pack-n-play. There (bed hog that he was) he spent the night, relegating Mom and Dad to the mattress edges all night.
Most of the other family were scheduled to arrive throughout the day; we were the first ones there. We decided to drive into Eureka Springs and have a look. Once more, we employed IRMA (the name we gave our Garmin GPS device), who quickly found a way to get us onto the back roads and non-obvious paths.
On the way into town, we passed a sign advertising "Bubba's BBQ." We thought with a name like "Bubba's" and being in the South, we needed to try it. We planned to make it our lunch. As it turned out, it would become a goal and then a quest to experience lunch at Bubba's this week. It would not be today we dined there.
We drove through the historic downtown, but decided we needed to return to the cabin so we could get Xavier back on his nap schedule. It was at least thirty minutes back to the cabin, and we still needed to stop for lunch and hit a grocery store to buy some things for the family feast tonight.
We ate lunch at a local Mexican restaurant in the same center as the market. Xavier had already fallen asleep, but woke up as soon as the car came to a stop. While waiting for our meal, Rebecca looked down and saw a little pinhead sized critter slowly moving across Xavier's head.
It was a tick. Xavier had spent the morning before we left playing outside. The area of Arkansas where we were has ticks, all year 'round except when it freezes. We asked the same lady who helped us with directions yesterday "what kind of bugs do you have down here?" Her answer was something like "the usual and a few ticks."
We got the tick out; it had not set itself in yet, so it was easy enough to pull once Rebecca could get her fingers to hold it. After lunch, it was back to the store for various tick repellent items, and a set of tweezers.
It rained the rest of the day. Xavier slept back at the cabin. I studied the art of tick removal in case the need arose again.