Tick tock

There are many disadvantages to having extremely fair hair and skin, most having to do with their inability to protect from the sun. It turns out there are a few advantages, however (beyond being able to absorb maximum vitamin D in a dark climate, which California is not). For instance, the contrast in color makes it really easy to find ticks.

I've spotted ticks on Isaac on at least five occasions without even looking for them -- crawling in his hair, usually, but also biting his armpit, and one time biting his thumb. So I wasn't surprised when this morning, as we were reading together, I saw a minute dark speck in his hair.

It would have been impossible to see in darker hair, even in sandy blonde hair. It could have been a grain of sand, or a speck of dust. But it was the tiniest deer tick* I have ever seen.

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It's much easier to see the dog tick, which is about 50 times bigger than the deer tick, and perhaps therefore I see them much more often. Earlier this week as I was getting out of bed in the morning, I found one crawling on my pillow.

Yucky, and of course we don't want Lyme disease, but what can we do? Ticks are unavoidable. Should we not play outside? Should we stop gardening? Should we move away from the edge of the woods? Should we slather ourselves in Deet on a daily basis? All unthinkable. It wouldn't even help to banish the dog, since at least some of the ticks are coming in on people. Every once in a while I decide to institute a nightly tick-check of people and dog, but it never lasts more than a few days. We will just continue to deal with it on a tick-by-tick basis.

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*Actually, maybe it's the Western black-legged tick, which is supposed to be similar to the deer tick. It's so gross looking at enlarged pictures of ticks on the Internet that I can't really tell.