So after the pregnancy sickness, the cold and the baby scare I woke up on the weekend of the 15th December feeling fantastic ready for anything. But all that changed pretty soon.
Captain Jack (my first baby) had his appointment with his dog groomer who comes round every few months in her grooming van. As usual she takes him to the van at the front of the house but ten minutes later returns at the door with him dripping wet.
‘Gill, we can’t groom him’ she says.
‘Why not?’ I reply.
‘He’s covered in fleas’ she says.
Well, my face was a picture. I nearly died and what else could a pregnant person do with news like this? That’s right, burst out crying! I was absolutely mortified…
‘I feel like a scrubber’ I cried to the groomer.
‘The poshest people have dogs with fleas Gill, it’s really not a big deal’ she says.
Not that big a deal?? Good God woman I’m going to have to fumigate the house!
Anyway, Captain Jack, oblivious to his mum having a breakdown, was whisked up to the bathroom by Andrew and washed using flea shampoo while I rung my mum (as you do in a crisis) sobbing that ‘something awful had happened’. Mum panicked thinking something had happened to the baby but as soon as I wailed ‘Jack’s got fleas’ she realized that actually ‘something awful’ hadn’t happened it was just her daughter over reacting.
‘It’s like your child having nits’ I wailed to my mum.
‘Well in about 5 years you’ll have that to deal with too’ she replied cheerily. Cheers mum.
Needless to say she came with me to Pets at Home to load up on flea control products. I managed to get over a hundred pounds worth of products in my basket before some lovely sales assistant came over and questioned what the heck I was doing.
‘My dogs got fleas’ I cried. ‘And I’m pregnant so can I use any of these things?
He looked at me like I was a woman possessed then preceded to remove every item from the basket and put them back on the shelf.
‘You need this, this and this’ he said, saving me about 70 pounds in the process. We then got a lecture in fleas and how to get rid of them which resulted in me crying every time he mentioned ‘eggs’, ‘larvae’ and ‘bites’ and mum asking him ‘have you got a PHD in fleas?’
Anyway, that weekend was spent de flea-ing Captain Jack and boil washing every bit of soft furnishing from the house, spraying every nook and cranny and binning a lot of stuff which to be honest was just too difficult for me to clean (bean bags, laundry basket, etc).
The house was the cleanest it’s been since we moved in, leading Andrew to announce
‘I hope Jack gets fleas more often if it means you’ll clean this well’. Cheeky sod.
