Escape of the Roaches

A few posts ago I shared our family’s pleasure with our six hissing cockroaches. Well, we are down to three…that we know of. Oh, the other three cockroaches may still be alive and thriving, but we really can’t know for sure because, well, they escaped their cage.

Yes, that’s right, we have three Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches roaming the house.

I know that is the stuff of nightmares for many people. I am not one of them. Neither are my boys or my  husband. Which is a good thing, obviously, because I certainly am not about to move to a new house over this breakout.

We know how it happened. My son left the cage open while he changed their food and cleaned their food dish. I estimate the door was open about three or four minutes. When I saw the door open, I closed it and told the boys to count the roaches. Three. I counted the roaches. Three. They counted the roaches again, and so did I. Three.

We’ve now ransacked the downstairs, pulling cushions from the couch, lifting the couch, even turning over endtables and looking up into lamps to see if they’d scurried up and off the floor. No dice. Or rather, no cockroaches.

I’m not worried, though. The cockroaches are all male, so they *shouldn’t* breed in our eaves. (I quality that *shouldn’t* because I really don’t know how the person who sold them to us could know if they were male or female, and because, hey, what if the three males should meet three females somehow?) And there’s always this: One roach actually escaped a couple of weeks ago, but we didn’t know it until my husband went into a lower kitchen cabinet in search of a mixing bowl and found a cockroach gazing at him from the bowl. (Now we know how that one probably got out.) So there’s a good chance we’ll find the fugitives at some point and get them back into the cage.

In the meantime, we’re down to three cockroaches. One per boy. I can live with that.