Tick Tacky

My husband and I have been trying in vain to start a fake rumor. Here goes:

Did you hear that when Britney Spears' baby was brought in for the skull fracture, they also found a tick on him?

You might ask why we are doing this or where it came from, but I really have no idea. The more important question is why didn't it spread? Wouldn't you think a rumor like this would take hold? And it's not like we didn't try. Everywhere we've been for the last couple of weeks, we've discussed it. Loudly.

"I mean, a fractured skull is one thing, but a tick?"

"I know! That's just gross. There was a tick on her baby?"

"How bad a parent do you have to be to have a tick on your baby?"

"Do they even have ticks in California? How'd they even find a tick there?"

"With all that money, they still can't keep a tick off the baby. Unbelievable."

And on and on.

I'm fessing up to this now because A.) The skull fracture story is old news, so no one is likely to care about the tick addendum, and B.) It's such a perfect rumor I just wish it were true, and C.) The universe is trying to punish me with a plot straight out of Edgar Allen Poe.

This weekend I'm casually cleaning the house when I spy a mashed blueberry on the floor. "What's a blueberry doing here?" I ask aloud as I pick it up, immediately assuming that there is a wild bramble of blueberries growing in the abandoned yard next door to us, even though that yard usually only produces garbage and strange smells.

"Let me see." Herr Guitar, former boy scout and blueberry aficionado that he is, takes one look at my hand and declares, "That's a tick."

A tick. A TICK! ATICKINMYHOUSE! ON MY FLOOR! NEAR MY BABY! And I touched it! Eeeeek!

Angus found himself a tick, probably in the yard next door but more likely in the woods by a friend's parents' house visited the weekend before. (The place is a five minute drive from where we live but you might as well be on another planet in terms of the landscape, as well as the average income.) HG did a tick check on Angus (and Swaddlini) after we'd been there - all the while laughing at the faux tick negligence of Sean Preston Federline Spears' inattentive and trashy parents - and he didn't find anything. And then a bloated, exploded tick falls from the dog's disgusting body. Looking all blueberryesque. What if I'd decided to eat it? (Because that's what I do, eat squashed blueberries off the floor.) What if?

So that is my punishment for attempting to spread a false rumor. I'm coming clean in the hopes that my family will be spared. I probably deserve my tick, just as Angus probably deserves his impending lyme disease, HG probably deserves all those merit badges and Britney probably deserves her millions.

And yet, with all her millions, she can't keep that baby tick-free? It's a shame.