'Alien' Invasion

One sight of them sends my nine year-old son running through the house to hide underneath a blanket.  If my eight year-old daughter sees one she screams a high-pitched shrill, and as for myself, I have been so freaked out by them that I recently jumped three feet in the air when one flew in my hair while I was cooking dinner. 

What is it that frightens me and my children so?  It’s those ugly, beetle-like annoying insects that as of just a year ago I had never even seen before, but now they seem to appear everywhere – stink bugs! 

My kids and I realize of course that we humans are about a thousand times their size and that stink bugs don’t bite or sting and can’t hurt us, but when they fly around they sound loud and scary and they are just so darn ugly and alien-looking that we can’t help but be creeped out by them.

Also, there are just so many of them!  Remember at the end of last summer? It seems like there were hundreds of them plastered all over the windows and doors trying to get inside!  My kids were afraid to walk past them and had to run at full speed whenever they wanted to go inside the house.  They even invented a game where they tried to karate chop the bugs off the window screens with big sticks.  But the persistent little creatures just flew right back up on them and continued their mission of trying to break in.

Then all of a sudden, what seemed like overnight, they completely disappeared.  Am I the only one wondering where they all went?  I keep thinking that if I look behind the pictures hanging on our wall or lift our couch that I am going to discover a thousand of them in hibernation - like something out of a Stephen King novel!

And I may not too far off on that because in the last couple of weeks, it seems they are coming back out of hiding. I have spotted about 10 stink bugs flying around in my house… and my children are starting to freak out again.   

 “Mommy, where did they all come from?” my daughter asked me the other day hiding under the couch cushions as I was waiting for one to land so I could send it to its final resting place.  "I think they came from Japan," I told her, but I was really wondering if they arrived here from some other planet, to take over our planet Earth.     

Until human ingenuity develops an insecticide to which they are not immune, I guess we better get used to these irritating pests.  I saw a guy profiled on the local news the other night who claims that he has sucked up 15,000 of the little critters in his shop vac.  One man had 15,000 stink bugs in his house?  If that is not frightening, I don’t know what is.  My kids better get some bigger sticks!