You Got a Tick....Where?

Very early this morning, way, way way before the sun was up, Phillip came into my room and declared that he was soaking wet after having wet the bed. This is a very rare occasion. I'm lucky in that once my kiddos are potty trained they are fully potty trained (during the day and night). But, occasionally accidents do happen, so I groggily got up and helped him out of his wet clothes. As I was hanging them over the side of the tub I could see out of the corner of my eye that Phillip was kind of inspecting and pulling on his penis. I went over to him and he said "mom, what's this?". I looked down and saw a black little dot on his penis and suddenly knew....TICK.

They are ubiquitous in Missouri and we frequently have to do tick checks, especially in the summer after they've been playing a lot outside. So far we've been lucky. We had one close call when we first moved here with Sophie, but other than that, we've never actually had one embed itself into our skin. I'm not sure how this one evaded our detection, because Phillip had a bath before bed and with his light hair, and his even lighter skin, they're pretty easy to detect. Somehow or other we missed this guy and by the middle of the night this little bugger was well on his way into Phillip's skin and I went into a little panic mode. Never having to actually deal with a tick in this state, I wasn't sure what to do. I tried to remember things I had heard of other people doing. The first one was to put nail polish on the skin around the tick which is supposed to suffocate the tick and it will retreat. NO GO.

Next I remembered hearing that if you burn it, it will also try to retreat. I woke Dave up to help me with this one. I didn't want to have and open flame so close to my little boy's privates, so I put some wet gauze around the perimeter of the tick so as not to burn Phillip and then Dave lit a match, blew it out and touched the tip of the match to the tick. NO GO.

They in my sleep induced panic I thought...GOOGLE. I went to the internet and looked it up and the suggestion was to get a pair of tweezers, very close to the skin and gently, but firmly pull it out. JACKPOT. That little booger was not very willing, but after some persistent pulling, out he came. I hope I got it all. It looked like he came clean out, but I'm going to keep my eye on it for the next few days. You're all itching now, aren't you? Thankfully Phillip has a well child check-up next week so we can check with the doctor then too. I don't know how quickly ticks can't cause damage, and I never thought I would say this, but I'm so glad Phillip wet the bed and we caught it when we did!