The Nightmare in Our Backyard

Yesterday was another gorgeous spring day. Maddy wore a very cute spring dress to church and after we came home and ate lunch we went outside to take some pictures. I am trying to take her one year old pictures instead of going to a studio. We took 121 pictures of the poor girl and got about 4 or 5 that we really liked. The two above are cute but not the best one. I need to run those through photo shop and I will as soon as I can find my photoshop book to refresh my memory on how to do a few things. I threw all of my books like that in a box before Maddy was born because they were in what is her room now and now they are somewhere in the labyrinth of our understairs storage. After that marathon photo shoot, Maddy was pretty tired and went down for a nap. This is when Aaron and I decided to go outside and work on making a garden plot in our backyard. We picked out a roughly 4x6 space in what seemed an optimal spot and began to dig the grass out of it. As Aaron dug up the chunks I was supposed to bust the extra dirt off the grass roots with a hand trowel and then throw them in the trash can. So we began. A few minutes into it I came across a couple of fat, white, ugly grubs nestled into the grass roots. So I immediately said "Ewww, Aaron what are these?" Since Aaron isn't an entomologist he didn't know. But he figured they probably weren't anything we wanted so he squished them. He did this, not by stepping on them like a normal person would do, but by picking them up and squeezing them between his fingers. (He did have gloves on.) So this was enough to give anyone the heebie jeebies. As we continued to dig we came across more and more white grubs. They were everywhere! Suddenly a light clicked on. We started wondering if the "grubs" were actually roach larve. Our suspicions were confirmed when Aaron came across a fully formed young roach who would soon have been ready to crawl out of the ground and start terrorizing the neighborhood, but his life was ended at the appropriate time by a wise human being. As soon as Aaron found that I lost control. Without half realizing what I was doing I sprinted toward the cement patio before he'd even had time to dispose of the roach. "Sorry" I said. "I am done. I am going to Wal-Mart to get spray to spray around the foundation of our house." I found it hard to even walk on the grass knowing what lay beneath. Ugg! Aaron convinced me to do a few other chores that didn't involve digging roach larva out of the ground while he quickly finished up the garden plot by deciding he just needed to dig up the grass and get rid of it. The dirt didn't matter because we already have all the hard, sticky clay we need. I killed some ants and cleaned up some weeds. Then we went and had dinner with some friends and afterwards made a very necessary trip to Wal-Mart where we found not only insecticide to spray around the outside of the house but stuff we can put straight on the lawn to kill all kinds of ugly and disgusting pests that are breeding in our yard. Normally I'm not a big fan of using a lot of chemicals on my yard or plants, but these things have got to go. It's going to rain tomorrow so we have to wait til Wednesday to put all of this down and I am just hoping that all the roaches don't start crawling out of the ground and invading our house before then. Shivers!!!