Welcome to Baby Brain, a space where I – Charlotte, hi! – write about life with three small children – Poppet (m, 6 years), Pickle (m, 4 years) and Peach (f, 1 year.) Those are not their real names. These are real stories from our days.
In May 2024, I shared a post:
from which the main takeaway, for most people, was this:
An aside about the cleaner: We have had several cleaners over the years, the one in the story of sandwichmageddon being a new one. My favourite cleaner (down the rabbit hole I go) left us after our daughter was born due to traffic in the local area causing her too many problems. This was deeply upsetting because she did a fantastic job and also never once mentioned that my husband had showed her around our house with a slug in his hair the first time she came to us, which I think shows integrity. I imagine her seeing that slug and thinking not “this man has been in the shed, I should tell him about the slug” but instead “Jesus Christ these people need me more than I thought.” He discovered the slug after he’d finished his tour, bewildered as to why the nice woman he’d just been chatting to for the last ten minutes hadn’t told him it was there. I choose to believe she thought it was a quirk of some sort, perhaps a pet. And sometimes I wonder if maybe she was afraid of us because of the slug and that’s the real reason she left, but I try not to dwell on it. Please come back Hayley we need you.
That was part one of our bug related woes.
Consider this part two.
A couple of months back, we went to the zoo. It was quiet, a Sunday, and we were having a mooch through the lesser visited areas, casual as we are about such things since investing our life savings into a year long pass. On this mooch, we went into the insect house (as I said, not as worried about the big ticket animals now we’re not day pass peasants) where we encountered a tank of Jewel Wasps.
I took a video of one making a nest for her impending babies:
She is amazing, I know. And I mean I really know, I stood staring at her for a good ten minutes and she didn’t take a single break. Watching with fascination, I was marvelling at Julie’s (I named her) stamina when I noticed – as you may have noticed – a mass within the tube she was feverishly blocking with pebbles. Looking closer, I saw that said mass was a cockroach. A cockroach that – AI informed me – she had injected with venom, turning it into a sort of zombie before casually pulling it (it would have followed her willingly, apparently) into her glass vial, where she had laid her eggs and was now sealing them in with the living corpse cockroach so that, when they hatched, he’d still be fresh and they could eat him. Fascinating, no? No? Alright then.
Anyway. I was watching this poor, vile creature be buried alive whilst musing on how far we mothers will go for our young, thinking ‘yeah, you know what, give me some venom I’ll try it’, when I heard a (manly?) shriek from my left. My husband. He was watching the orangutans with the kids and so I assumed one had tried to like, break the glass or something (the ‘tans, not the kids, though I wouldn’t put it past Pickle) and so I pulled myself away from my new loves, the vindictive wasps, to see what was amiss.
Arriving next to my family, I saw my husband slapping at himself. I saw him point at the ground in horror. I saw a massive f***ing cockroach, twitching its antennae, very much not zombified and having dropped from the ceiling onto my husband’s head.
Disgusting, and apparently a common problem in the insect house, which we haven’t returned to since.
Fast forward a few weeks, and I was mocking my husband for all of the above, unable as I am to let anything slide. Marvelling at the fact that he has not yet been affected by the school’s rampant army of headlice, I was halfway through a joke at his expense when I felt something on my ear. Thinking it to be my own hair causing a tickle, I reached back. There was something there. I pincer gripped and pulled out my hand to find… An absolutely enormous fly, which I’d managed to pluck from my hairline and murder (manslaughter?bugslaughter?), crushing it beyond recognition and leaving me with the horrified conclusion that I, too, now attract creepy crawlies. This is my karma for telling everyone about the slug.
We might change our name to ‘The Twits.’
Until next time 🪳
P.S. Husband found an absolutely massive spider making a web in his hair the other day. What is wrong with us???
A version of this post originally appeared on ‘I Hate These People.’ Written by Daisy Cashin, IHTP is a brilliant Substack, and one you should definitely read. You can find the post (which includes the full ‘part one’ of this whole saga), here.
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So funny! The slug! I've heard of strangers not letting you know when you have food stuck in your teeth but a slug in your hair??? How rude. Haha. Adorable pic.
This is hilarious, the bugs are becoming part of your extended family 😂