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That’s right!  I know it because I’m a TICK magnet!

I’ve had 3 tick bites so far this Spring.  They FREAK me out!

 

Wes and Madison haven’t had ONE tick bite and they’ve been doing a lot of BushWacking (because we’ve gotten into GeoCaching).  Not one on either of them.

I’m not complaining, don’t get me wrong.  I’m SUPER glad neither of them have had one.

 

I just don’t understand what it is about ME that they love!  Just me and Brody.  We’ve found 5 ticks on Brody.  Two of them had just jumped on for a ride and hadn’t sunk their fangs in yet.  Friggin’ ticks!

 

This winter was so mild, we didn’t have enough freezing days in a row to kill them off, apparently.  (According to our Vet.)

We are religious about doing Brody’s Flea and Tick treatment.

I use Tea Tree oil products on my hair once a week.  I don’t wipe myself down with Deet every time I  go outside.  That would get old after about the 5 time each day.

What am I to do? 

Eat more onions?

Bathe in Tea Tree oil every morning?

Hang a string of garlic around my neck?

 

I’m seriously thinking this might be my best option!

(Found at Amazon.)

 

Seriously, anyone have any Tick Avoidance advice?   (Other than “Don’t go outside”.)   I’m kind of desperate here!

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Comments

  1. They love me too. Ewwww! I’ve had two on me this summer. It is going to be a bad year for them. Last year Buddy ran through a tick nest (we think) and I ended up pulling 30 ticks off him. He still had a week to go before a new frontline treatment, but the vet said that I might have to up it to every 3 weeks to get through the summer.

    You could spray deet products on your clothing, especially your pant cuffs. That might help.

    • I would literally hurl if I had to remove 3, let alone 30. Amazingly, Wes has been home every time a tick was discovered and saved the day. He has a whole “Kit” assembled. I’d literally have to have Deet on me 24/7 because I got a tick one morning when I hadn’t even been outside yet. I did say hello to Brody, who had been outside (and hadn’t been thoroughly checked). I think I will keep a bottle by the front door anyway.

  2. Before our neighbors were foreclosed on, we had a massive infestation of ticks because of them. I mean, we tried just about everything, toxic and not. If you are picking them up around the yard a lot, rake up as many leaves as possible. Once the house next door was bought by someone else and they cleaned up the 4 inches of leaves in their yard, the ticks disappeared, almost over night. The kids and I had to do several rounds of antibiotics because of how many tick bites we suffered.

    • I might have to buy the bee keeper suit for Brody and me! Yuck. Glad your tick problem cleared up. I’m hoping for a REALLY cold winter!

  4. I wear hats and stay out of tall grass or brush, but I live on a small lot in town so that’s easy for me. I’ve been saying since December this summer is going to be awful for all bugs because winter was so mild. I’m expecting the mosquitoes to be really bad here.

  5. Wow…Brody is so cute. I have to be honest I don’t know what bushwacking is or geocaching are. Sounds interesting tho. My 2 dogs are generally in the back yard so we don’t have that problem…but I’m sure you’ll get a lot of suggestions. Good luck.

    • LOL Bushwacking is trudging around in nasty terrain. Geocaching is like treasure hunting. People hide cashes (all shapes and sizes) and log them in online with GPS coordinates and hints and you try to find them. They’re all over the world.

      (Madison loves it and it’s given us a way to trick her into hiking without complaining about it. LOL)

  6. Dang! I’m sure you’d rock that sweet bee-keeper outfit, though. Not to scare the craps out of you, but my cousin (in Arkansas) just got Lyme disease last summer, and then my husband told me about his uncle who died from Lyme disease, and now I am petrified of ticks. I had one when I was 10, and Saylor had two when she was 3. They are freaky. Yuck. I hope you find a solution, and then share it with me. Cause, like I said, petrified.

    • Sorry to hear about T’s uncle. That is so sad. I’m petrified of getting it. Although, it is not common in this area and the ticks we’ve found are not generally the ones that carry it and I’ve not had them on me long enough for them to have given me the disease (generally). I still don’t want the freaking things biting me. I’d probably be the .01% that against all odds did get Lyme disease under all the wrong circumstances. Maybe a $75 investment in the bee-keeper suit would be worth it!

      • “Although, it is not common in this area and the ticks we’ve found are not generally the ones that carry it and I’ve not had them on me long enough for them to have given me the disease ”

        Both those statements are so far from the truth. All ticks carry TBD. If a rabid dog bite you and broke the skin, but didn’t latch on…would you dismiss possibly having rabies because he’s didn’t latch on for long? The same is true for ticks.

        Please always wear deet based products while outside. It’s better to be safe, then sorry.

        Also .. I passed lyme to my son through birth (I didn’t even know I had lyme at the time).

  7. Oh, and yeah, OBVIOUSLY you’re sexy. Ticks don’t bite people who aren’t. It’s a little-known fact.

  8. I have no idea about ticks can hurt people, only animals.
    I’m a flea magnet, and once I saw in my mixrobiology class.
    People with magnet for flea or others are magnets
    Because generate more carbon dioxide, and that us the magnet.
    Sorry for my English.

    • I just need to stop breathing so much then? LOL

      p.s. Your English is better than any foreign language I speak so don’t apologize. 🙂

  9. Doesn’t DEET come in a spray form too?? I would live in that if ticks liked me like they like you… ewwwwww, can’t stand ’em! Can you have the exterminator spray your yard during the summer? Are there plants that they don’t like?? Now I’m all itchy!!!

    • We have sprayed our yard. And before that, we treated it something you spread on the grass with a seed spreader. I think the bee-keeper suit or Deet are my next defense.

  10. We geocache, too! Have you tried waymarking? They’re virtual caches, where you have to get a picture of you with a certain object and post it on the site.

    The only time we’ve had trouble with ticks while doing so was in Arkansas one July – the girl & I put on some sort of bug repellant, but the hubby didn’t. I had nightmares for days, since I was the one who got to remove all those nasty things off him. Luckily bleach water did it fairly easily.

    • I haven’t had to remove one yet. I’m not sure what is worse, getting them or removing them. I guess if Wes ever does get one then I’ll find out. Crossing my fingers I’ll never see the day…

      We haven’t done the virtual caches. Madison ignores them because she likes the tangible reward of finding it. Even if there’s no “prize” inside. We took one excursion where we found a cashe and didn’t realize until later that you could take a picture in front of a certain sign for another. The “excursion” made me so motion sick we had to stop 4 times in 11 miles. Definitely not going back to take a picture in front of the “Tail of the Dragon” sign. That road is made for “hogs”.

  11. Up here in Canada they are REALLY bad. We easily pull off 75 – 125 every couple days off the outside dogs. This latest check we found them between the dogs toes, private areas and eye lids. Our indoor poodle seems to attract them in 3’s and the humans usually have at least 1 or 2 each a day. Just part of living in the country on an acreage, in Canada, in Manitoba. We are planning on moving down South, hoping the grass is greener without the ticks!

    • Good Lord , I’d put in a gravel yard if I found that many each day. Seriously? That is a lot of ticks. I guess you get used to it after so long. This is the first season that I’ve ever seen a tick up close and personal so it’s difficult for me to get a handle on it. All in good time, I suppose. But 75-125! I don’t think I could ever get a handle on that many.

      • 20 acres would be pretty expensive to cover in gravel. lol I used to shake in fear when I found one but with so many around now I’ve conquered my fear out of necessity. It has gotten so bad with the outdoor dogs that we now just use an empty container with alchohol in it or gas and dump them in as we pluck them off. We use Melaluca shampoo regularly which helps but doesn’t stop the little pests. They are so gross.

  12. Oh Lordy! I’m in Alaska (no ticks here yeah!) but moving to WNC next year, and when I visited there had a tick each time and I wasnt even out in the woods! They creep me out so much! Deet may be my new best friend or I won’t go outside at all! Check out the CDCs link on ticks, I did yesterday. One thing it said was to put a defensible space of a gravel walk around your lawn to keep ticks out. Really?!! Hate the cold but hey if it knocks’em dead in the winter, bring on the cold weather next winter! It at least won’t be the -40 as it is here in the winter!

  14. We get them at our cabin BAD, and having three dogs running around through the brush doesn’t help. This year will be especially bad due to the mild winter. In the past, my husband has sprayed the perimeter of the yard with some kind of tick killer and that cut them back a lot, but if it rains frequently it has to be reapplied. Normally I’m not a huge fan of pesticides, but in this case I put up with it because I hate ticks more.

    I don’t like putting on the bug spray with DEET (especially on my 2 year old) but supposedly that’s the only thing that really repels them. When you’re outside, try wearing light colored clothing, wear a hat and tuck your pant legs into your socks (looks dorky but it does keep them from crawling up your pant legs! Ewww!). We also use Frontline on the dogs and have them vaccinated for Lyme disease. Good luck, I HATE ticks too!

  15. I am very sad to see how much you don’t take ticks bites seriously.

    I have chronic lyme disease with bartonella because of a tick I never saw and never had a rash from.

    I have spent thousands upon thousands getting well again and that was after damn near a year of more then 30+ doctors trying to figure out what was wrong with me.

    I don’t even step foot with deet on. Lyme Disease is no joke and I hope you have been fortunate so far, but luck does run out eventually.

    Please watch Under our Skin on Hulu.. that will be a great eye opener.

    BTW folks – please DO NOT follow the CDC guidelines. It’s a joke and their testing is DESIGNED for most to test negative to lyme disease. For real info about lyme disease, please see ILADS.org

  16. Hi Sandra…love your blog…you’re a very talented woman…thanks for sharing your skills with us wanna be’s 🙂 I checked for a natural remedy for ticks & found that lavender is a good repellent…I’d get a lightweight oil (like coconut oil…and put 4 to 5 drops of lavender in it)…rub that all over your body when going out. to get it into your system so that it will naturally will begin repelling…put 2 drops into an 8 oz glass of water & injest daily…this will put it into your blood supply and you should begin repelling the ticks naturally….you can check out this information at aromatools.com

  17. Natural predators are chickens, wild turkey and pheasants. They all eat more than 20 ticks daily and can help keep the tick population down. I never get bit by bugs except lady bugs when I move them around, no ticks, no fleas and it is said to be because of my chemical make-up, diet and very low pulse rate. I was told that using wormwood helps keep sucking bugs away from you and your dog. You should only use wild crafted or organic wormwood products. You eat it and then the bugs can smell it in your skin and stay away from you.

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