Remember that little 5-day trip to New York I took a few weeks ago? Well, something mysterious went down in connection with that trip, and I think we've just figured it out today.
Back story: we got back from the trip, and maybe a day or two later May started complaining about feeling like she'd been mosquito-bitten, all over. She had these awful hives, and they itched like crazy, mostly on her arms and legs. I developed similar symptoms the next day, although not as severely. This is exactly what happens when we go camping and actually get bitten by mosquitoes: May's reaction tends to be much worse than mine. Also, the hives really did look like bug bites. Uncannily so, in fact.
I had the crazy notion that it was bedbugs, but that was quickly dismissed by the fact that we weren't getting new bites, and we'd slept in my brother and his partner's bed in New York City, and they weren't showing these symptoms.
So, then we thought maybe it was this crazy laundry detergent we'd picked up by mistake at the supermarket, with all kinds of weird perfume in it, to which maybe our skin was reacting when we slept on our freshly-laundered sheets. And thus did begin the Great Re-Laundering Of All Our Clothes, which lasted for about a week and a half, and I tellya: the washing. And the carrying. And the folding. And the putting away. They were interminable. But we got through it.
And still, no new hives, and mine kind of died down, and May's didn't. So, May went to see a dermatologist, in whose office the children behaved immensely cutely, and who told her it must be a virus, and here, have some cortisone cream, nothing for it but symptom relief, should clear up in 4-6 weeks, tut-tut.
So finally, I got an email today from my brother saying he and his partner had been experiencing the same thing recently, and they'd finally ripped apart their entire bed frame and found... a nest! Of bedbugs, after all.
Mystery solved. The bedbugs: they bite, and it's no fun. Thank goodness we don't appear to have brought them home with us in our clothing or luggage. I don't even want to think about what it would have taken to get rid of them. We can hopefully just chalk this up as another part of the whole NYC adventure.