Eek! A Tick!

One of my favorite times with Izzy is when she just wakes up from a restful night. She quietly plays with her toys until one of us goes in to pick her up. This morning was not as much fun. She was in a delightful mood and had picked up her comb. I sat down with her and started to do her hair when I saw it. A black speck with legs on the back of my baby's head. I instantly identified it as a tick and yelled for Joe to help remove the nasty little crawly who had embedded itself into my daughters head. I knew it would take two of us and he would be much calmer about it.
After a game of distract Izzy with toys she isn't allowed to play with and some quick tweezer action from Joe, the tick was safely removed from Izzy's sweet little head.
We finished the morning according to our normal routines and Izzy was off to daycare. Here's what I've learned from our tick scare:

• You have to remove the whole tick. I remembered hearing that before, but without Joe's quick and precise hands, we may not have fared so well.
• If you save the tick, some towns will test them for lyme disease. (This mean little POS is sitting in a bottle on the window sill in my kitchen. I HOPE IT FRIES in the sun.)
• Smaller ticks are the ones more likely to carry lyme. This one isn't too small, but I don't want to take any chances.
• For the next 30 days we have to watch out for: a rash anywhere on her body, not just the site of the tick bite, fever/body aches.
• Clean the site of the bite and keep it clean.
• Some research shows that a tick needs to be embedded/gorging on blood for 24 hours before Lyme Disease is transferred.
• The state of CT doesn't allow daycares (even small family centers like the one Izzy goes to) to spray their yards with pesticides that could protect from ticks. So I have to spray my kid with bug spray instead. Makes a lot of sense. You can't use one chemical but you can use another? This is a whole other story. I know I have dogs and the tick could very well have traveled in on them. Or the tick could have fell on Izzy from a tree while we were outside. But we just got a notification from daycare saying she was no longer allowed to spray her yard for ticks and we should be very diligent about checking at home.

Needless to say I'm ticked that this nasty little bug bit my daughter, but I do find a little comfort knowing that the tick seems to be bigger than a deer tick and it wasn't there for very long. Just another lesson in parethood. I'll be checking Izzy from head to toe from now on.